MAYOR: Early moves on second bridge

If you tuned in to this week's council meeting, you would have heard an update from the NZTA team in charge of building our second urban bridge and connecting road.

This is one project that I am pleased to see gathering pace and there's a lot of preliminary work going on - from sampling the river bed to encouraging the threatened black-billed gulls to nest well away from the construction zone.

We expect to hear soon who might be in the running to design and build the second bridge and connecting road, remembering Government is paying for the bridge and approaches, and Council is paying for the street that will link to Grahams Road.

I urge anyone who is interested in the bridge project to sign up for email updates from NZTA, via their website, or come along to an information session at Te Whare Whakatere on Thursday 11 September. From 3.30pm to 6.30pm, you'll be able to talk to the project team, ask questions and see maps of planned work.

Also on the agenda for this week's meeting was the Water Services Delivery Plan - this is the plan Council needed to make as part of the Government's Local Water Done Well reforms.

The reforms are all about ensuring Councils spend the money needed to make their drinking water and wastewater systems compliant with national rules.

It's a good thing that this Council, and those of the past, made sensible decisions about upgrades and renewals ... but there's still work to do.