Yeah, and stopping offering failed officials of cities that went bankrupt on sporting events (Birmingham) a cushy job here as a council CEO. We have our own incompetent freeloaders experienced in bureaucracy, no need to import them and pay their relocation fees.
Was in ChCh Oct last year. Mate staying with said the large indoor sports facility (Metro?) at Addington is just a complete cluster fudge of wasted money and Council incompetence. Huge time and cost over runs. A very expensive world class diving platform when NZ has never had world class platform divers. A builder friend who turns up there every day, but no seems in charge onsite and the day to day planning is awful
Not quite Addington, really central City (Moorhouse Ave). It is a TC3 land, lots of shallow underground water and truly average soil. This is why - although the buildings there were standing through the quakes - they slowly demolished the lot and decided to rebuild from scratch (years after 2011).
However, the initial plans to put more residential apartments in the CBD are stymied by the height limit (really a weight limit) due to soil stability, so they went for public works instead as no developer wanted to build small number of flats for big money. That is how we ended up with the sports centre. Once they put the foundations - in years ago - they soon realised the foundations are very slowly sinking into the ground.
I know we have issues with insufficient national income to pay for our infrastructure, but stuff like this seems like a banana republic performance, where certain things are just not possible to do because we do not have enough competency onboard.