Mayor 'in shakes’

Press, 9 April 1980, Page 6

Mayor ' in shakes’

■ Citizens’ Association leaders! had used “an unreasonable, irrational tirade laced with emotional half-truths” to reply to her “sober and reasonable” statement on Christchurch City Council economic policies, said the Labour mayoral candidate (Cr Mollie Clark) yesterday. She said the Mayor of Christchurch (Mr H. G. Hay) and-! his supporters were already “showing signs of being in an advanced stage of election , shakes.” The record would show her!, consistency “in giving strong and careful attention to the size and spending of the. public purse,” Cr Clark said.

SJne was only telling the council what every homemaker and business leader already knew — it was time to tighten the financial belt. In . saying that council officers had to be efficient, she was “not talking of persecuting top management or' an other group,” Cr Clark] said, “bqt of creating the enthusiasm and commitment to ' tackle the challenge of using available resources more effectively, and holding rates steady.” Cr Clark said the Queen Elizabeth II Park issue needed to be laid to rest “once and'for all.”

“It has been regularly raised by Citizens’ ! Association members jealous of

Labour’s brainchild and used to divert public gaze from the equally expensive Town Hall,” she said.

Queen Elizabeth II Park had been a solution to a 1971 problem, and it had been authorised as an alternative to being “perpetually embarrassed by the Citizens’ Association’s costly, halfbaked, inadequate Centennial Pool - Porritt Park proposal,” Cr Clark said. Her critics should recall “a few home truths” instead of “pin-pricking and distorting facts,” she said. She listed some claims Labour would make during the campaign.

Good business practice had been ignored, along with council procedures, in the letting of a substantial building contract for the Pioneer Sports Stadium in Centennial Park, she said. Citizens’ councillors were content to -press ahead with expensive planning and property purchases for expensive, unnecessary motorways and expressways when emphasis should be given to the streets, cycleways, and footpaths the city already had. Cr Clark said.

Much of the system was crying out for the attention the Mayor promised years ago,! she said. Mr Hay and Cr N. G. Hattaway had referred to the creche affair,' but failedyto

■mention “that they, in unseemly haste and stealth, jumped to satisfy the sketchy financial demands of the Mount Pleasant Squash Club while trying to dodge their responsibility to another community group, less] prestigious, yet as vital,” Cr Clark said. That had been “exercising discrimination of the worst kind.” If she and Sir Terence McCombs had not been “so dismayed and insistent about taking a tight grip of the situation” on the new Civic Offices building project, “early runaway costs would not have been so smartly arrested,” she said. As chairman of the project’s sub-committee,. Mr :Hay should have had his finger on the pulse right from the start, Cr Clark said. “Initiative is surely doing the right thing without being told ” she said.