In August 2023, the Houghton Valley Progressive Association revived the Lifting the Creek project and organised a workshop called Te Mauri O Te Wai in Haewai / Houghton Valley.
After being knocked back with getting this project up and running several times, the idea behind the workshop was to get beyond the impasse of authorities and local officials not doing anything because there is always something more urgent to fix or not enough money, despite being very supportive when we suggest what could be done to fix the problem.
We wanted to discuss what we know and would like to do, so that we could develop a brief for the project. Getting everything we know out of people’s head and into an inspiring document would be an essential first step towards creating a brief. From a brief could come a concept plan and then a developed design plan. We also wanted to work out how we could engage with authorities so that they could help us to advance the project, rather than expect them to do so. In other words – collaboration.
Along with 14 interested locals, the workshop was attended by Julie Anne Genter of the Green Party and Yadana Saw of Greater Wellington Regional Council. Julie Anne said that if the Green Party get into government, they will specifically set aside $100 million for projects such as ours, estimating that ours would be about $10 million. There was a possibility of getting a mention in an article in The Post about this policy, but if it was published it wasn’t obvious. Yadana suggested we contact our Ward Councillors and ask them to put the project into the Long Term Plan, and that WCC had a ‘Petition’ system that forced the Council to look at any approved request with over 20 signatures. One of the locals suggested contacting engineers who had a community ‘give-back’ system to provide some advice towards the concept plan.
In following up with WCC, Cr Tim Brown said that they had been discussing the project but it sounded like they were nowhere near ready to commit money to it. Hence our original plan of working through the preliminary design solutions to create a workable solution for them, rather than waiting, is more relevant than ever.
After the workshop we created a document: Te Mauri o Te Wai Haewai. This included the suggestions that came out of it as a first step towards a brief. We also planned another Creek Walk for November, as a follow up.