WCC Long Term Plan: Your Submission Guide
“Don’t tell me what you value; show me your budget and I’ll tell you what you value”. Last chance to make sure Wellington’s budgeting for what we value, over the next 10-30 years! Submissions due midnight Monday 10th May.
The two minute version:
We really like Generation Zero’s well-thought-out submission form.
So for a 2-minute easy quick submit, follow this link and you can tick or untick a bunch of statements to create a submission you fully support.
There’s an optional box to add any of your own hot takes in. You can leave this blank, put something personal in, or put in something like the following statement/s:
- I strongly support increasing the cycling minor works budget to allow for more pop up cycle lanes, and appropriate peripheral improvements like bike parking infrastructure.
- I strongly support prioritising cycleways that deliver more bang for buck. A lot of proposed cycleways require seawalls and other expensive support before they can be built, but many simply require a wee bit of reallocating space that’s already there, from lower-value uses such as car storage or painted medians. This can join up a safer connected route for people, and study after study has shown that joined-up safe networks are a cheap and effective way to make a big difference and get more people on wheels. Wellington deserves and urgently needs the benefits that much greater cycling and scooting brings to our towns, public health, our communities, our local commerce, and our climate.
There’s another super quick submission to make car sharing easier at the bottom of this post if you didn’t use your full two minutes on this one.
Longer options:
If you want more information you can find that here. Or if you’re ready to roll click here. If you want to go deep into your submission, there’s some great stuff out there from Generation Zero, Cycle Wellington, and Island Bay Healthy Streets for a bit of submission inspiration. Below is our little collage of what they have to say with our spin.
Infrastructure is critical. We rely on it every minute of every day, and some of ours is taking its last dying breath. Let’s make sure we continue to have access to the cutting edge of modern technology like sewage, and water we can drink!
Let’s not stop there either, let’s maybe even have an extensive and connected cycleway network that lets everyone get to the places we need to go, safely and sustainably.
Let’s have those cycleways and pipes connecting us to great community spaces where we can just be, and connect with our community and services.
If you’re a fan of all that, here’s the gist of what you want to tell the council:
- (Always) support greater mana whenua representation at the council table, and support council ensuring they are honouring Te Tiriti in everything they do.
- Support option 4 for cycleways (this funds lots of cycleways, not just a few)
- Support option 3 for three waters infrastructure (again, the biggest package, decreases the risk of pop-up water fountains by the most, we love pop up street changes, but these are a bit far)
- Support option 3 for Te Atakura (why declare a climate emergency, make a zero carbon plan, and then not do the critical step of just jolly doing it! This is the only option that fully enables the plan to be realised)
- Support spending money in general (with interest rates so low, and our infrastructure deficit so high, we’d really be silly not to be building, repairing, and improving as much as possible. If we don’t do it now, we might not even be able to borrow the money to do it in the future)
- Support all work in the city working towards safe streets for all people, particularly the disabled, women, and gender minorities. (Disabled people and women are often made unsafe on our streets and it really doesn’t need to keep happening)
Add anything else you’d like to say and you’re good to submit. Remember to get it in before midnight Monday 10th May.
Click here to submit.
While you’re in the submissions groove, why not show your support for car sharing vehicles accessing residents car parking spaces? Mevo have put out this easy letter sending form to help make it happen. Car sharing vehicles make life better for both the users and those around them, so it’s really a no brainer.
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