We're all familiar with the legion of arguments and counter-arguments as to the failure of the wastewater treatment plant out at Airport Road. But the bottom line is that for a damn good while the Tasman Sea has, shamefully, been the messy end of our collective dunny.
And we continue to pay as if we are all beneficiaries of a fully functioning system.
For whatever reasons, the reality is that the waste works have been a very long, drawn-out, slow-motion train wreck - both for the crash itself and the subsequent palaver of getting the locomotive and carriages back up and running.
So, in effect, Putiki and allied residents are being asked to doubly cough up - once for the privilege of not being able to enjoy the benefits of a non-existent system; and again for having to subsidise those who do - or, at least, hopefully will in the future. Talk about trying to flog a dead parrot.
This vaunted council initiative might be seen as a revolutionary new species of a rating system that's a hybrid aberrant cousin of some weird financial mutant like negative gearing. This is where the fewer facilities you enjoy, the more you pay for being able to rejoice in the knowledge that at least your neighbours are in clover.
There's a specious argument along the lines that residents - through their rates - indirectly pay for all manner of services and facilities they don't necessarily utilise.
For instance, some may seldom visit the library or art gallery, but still acknowledge these facilities as worthwhile adjuncts to community life - ergo, in the same way non-users of the city wastewater system might recognise its wider value.
But two big differences ...
Firstly, unlike those choosing to forgo the pleasures of the gallery or library, non-users of the waste system have no choice but to pay for an alternative system.
Secondly, the former are certainly not being asked to financially further contribute to a service they're unable to access even if they wanted to.
It's also proposed that Wharf Street boat ramp users should experience another variant of this topsy-turvy funding model.
In their case, it's not so much a matter of the less you have, the more you pay, but the more you have contributed, the more you cough up. In other words, having built the ramp itself in the first place for community utility, the boating community face the prospect of having to dish out more dosh to enjoy the fruits of their own labours.
Another analogy re the "tank tax" would be that, say, the residents of Aramoho, with its pitted and scurfed footpaths, should fork out extra for being able to raise their eyes and have the cockles of their collective heart warmed by the knowledge their fellow citizens on the sun-dappled St John's Hill heights traverse perfectly manicured pedestrian thoroughfares (that's what footpaths are called on St John's Hill).
Come on council, siphon the Python and flush these proposed decidedly dead and smelly surcharge parrots down the dunny.
