Waikato District Council is starting work on a review of Freedom camping in Raglan and other parts of the Coastal Waikato area.
Although the Freedom Camping Bylaw won’t be reviewed till 2023, you can give your feedback now and this will be used to draft the new bylaw. Council says you can show them where you think Freedom Camping should be Prohibited, Restricted to self-contained only or Allowed for non-self-contained freedom campers.
Over at the Waikato Regional Council Stuff.co.nz is doing it’s best to encourage more controversy by describing an equal 7 all vote as a split in the council, even though unified voting has never been the norm.
After the controversy of the last three years councillors pledged to play well together this time round. There still appears to be a tendency to controversy however, with councillors happy to talk to the media in a break during a council meeting after new councillor Noel Smith accused the Chair Pamela Storey of trying to stack the council committees with her supporters.
While Stuff was hot on the controversy they didn’t mention the outcome of the meeting which was that each of the council committees would choose their own chairs rather than the full council making the call where Pamela Storey would probably be forced to use her casting vote for each decision.
Also not reported in the Stuff article, an attempt to increase the climate change committee from 5 to 7 councillors was voted down but then 2 Maori councillors were unanimously added to the committee anyway to ensure a Maori worldview was included.
The council set up 9 committees but are still required to put another 12 together.
Local band Teamsquad are playing a gig at a secret location tonight somewhere in town. Rumors of the gig have been circulating all week and we understand that you might be able to find out the location by contacting Resa from the Rendezvous with Resa show on Raglan Community Radio or perhaps by contacting the band themselves.
And that is the Raglan news for Friday, December, 2, 2022.