Gerry Eckhoff: A true Story

Yes people – those of you who had reservations about Local government are absolutely right to do so –  please read on. In the small rural town of Lumsden (Northern Southern) a local building owner had to get a resource consent to do nothing. I kid you not. In fact it cost him $420 to do nothing.

The story goes like this: Rob bought the existing 60 year old bank to convert into a café. He would reasonably assume that consent would be forth coming for such a benign activity as a café, until the eagle eyed council staff noticed that the bank didn’t have a veranda. Now given the fact that the bank’s veranda hadn’t ever existed for 60 years with any difficulty it is not unreasonable to assume that the next 60 years would afford something similar. Further – should an earthquake occur in Lumsden, the place to be would be under the non existent veranda so that if it fell on you; you would not notice and certainly not be harmed.

Now,  there is a number of precedents here dear readers for such exceptional policies.

In the UK we farmers were paid not to grow crops. I naturally enough would have not grown a maize crop which is very expensive to grow so that the payments would have been much bigger than a payment to a fellow farmer not to grow a crop of oats which is less expensive to grow. Very soon all farmers worked out they were far better off being paid not to grow a crop of expensive maize.

I also would not have had to apply lots of NPK fertilizer so my expenses associated in not growing the crop of maize were huge. Add to that the cost of not spraying the maize and not to mention the harvesting costs, I could afford to buy a large and lovely villa in the South of France on the cheques from the Ministry. To my great surprise and delight I also received a environmental award for conserving the world precious resources in not growing this crop. Outstanding. In fact so outstanding was this policy I assume that the policy was thought of by the Green Party in the UK, or at least the US Federal Reserve.

Here in NZ we follow very similar policies. We pay people not to work. In fact the less they work the more we pay them which is of course very similar to paying farmers not to grow stuff or charging for not building a veranda.

Now our hero of the story (Rob) paid the council $675 and wanted a full refund for not building a veranda

He got $255 back along with some expressions of sympathy for his plight.

Now here’s the rub.

Not one council committee member voted to return his full processing fee of $675.

What is the old saying about heading to hell in a hand cart. Bill English lives just down the road at Dipton – or at least he did. Nice part of the world!