Rob Gould, born and bred in Christchurch, 20 years in the UK, former accountant, owner of The Honeypot Cafe

A blog for CBD businesses to contribute to, to share the highs and lows of our current situation, "the new normal", and beyond.

Access to the CBD

What to make of all the demonstrations this week? Demonstrating is not my thing, but I can understand the frustrations that led to the breaking of the cordon. Ultimately the reason people felt that they needed to demonstrate was the lack of communication.

Communication has been a major issue right from the first quake in September. The communication from the council has been very poor post that quake, and ever since. The council made a song and a dance about their precinct meetings that were held in early December. We all dutifully filled out our business names and email addresses and we haven’t heard a thing since. We were told precinct managers had been appointed and they would be in touch. Have we heard anything? No.

So the council are poor at communicating with business owners and now it seems they can’t contact building owners prior to buildings being demolished. Whose fault is that? Building owners pay rates, so they have a contact address. I am sure the council has spent many millions on systems to store documents relating to each building, and they can’t have a field in the database to store a couple of phone numbers? Now building owners have strong motivation to keep their details up to date, otherwise their building could be goneburgers!

So have the civil defence learnt from the mistakes of the council. Nope. For example I have details of 90 businesses in my precinct, and this is known to the council. Has anyone ever asked me to assist in contacting business owners?

One thing that did come out of September 4^th was the sense of community. Our precinct rallied together and held the pop up market day on December 19^th. It was great; we were all talking to each other, making a point of it in fact. Did the council think that this could be replicated and enhanced around the city by their so called precinct managers? Just think of precincts being broken down by street so that communications could be easily distributed. How much better would that be now, letting us know what is going on? Even if there is nothing to report it is still better to communicate.