Mayor Liz McMillian - Council Chat

Mayor Liz was in to explain how the budget for the road to the new Ashburton River Bridge has blown out from $7.5mil to $20mil

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Incredibly proud me and Liz just a little bit gutted though,
and I'm sure she will be too, you know, with
that first run, I mean, you spent four years just
relentlessly training for that moment and all it takes is
a fraction of a second, you know, a slight misjudgment
and something like that happens. A It's brutal. It's a
brutal game.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
I guess that's the sport, isn't it It is? Yeah,
I love the Winter Olympics. It's great, It's amazing, and
watch it when I can. But yeah, Zoe's got another
She's got the slope style I think so nice. Yeah,
she'll be in the mix for another metal I'm sure.
And there's plenty of others looking really good as well.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Yeah, big time. We'll have an update on that before ten.
I can only imagine what's running through their mind when
they're at the top of that big slope, looking down
on all the lights and the people cheering them on,
and then also you know, it keeps panning over the crowd,
the supporters. They look cold. I think if I'm going
to encourage Alice, my Alice to take up a sport,

(00:59):
I know I kind of like the sort of a
summer game, you know, just watching all those people ragged
up in the steps, but you'd be proud regardless. Oh yeah,
so good incredible stuff. Yeah, incredible effort from it this morning. Right,
you're in for some council chance. I want to go
to the thing that everyone seems to be talking about
at the moment, the new bridge budget seven and a
half million to twenty million. What happened?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
Well that seven and a half million was put in
quite a few years ago and.

Speaker 1 (01:29):
Has a burg blowout and we haven't even started.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
No, So well yes, so I think it's it's the
type of roating that we need. So it's not just
I mean it's for heavy vehicles, it's for everything. There's
roundabouts involved, there's a lot. We're learning more all the time,
so we're we're second day to day at doing our

(01:54):
and your plan budget. So we'll we get in some
more details on that.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
So you bring it all the experts to kind of
inform on these different projects and stuff.

Speaker 2 (02:01):
Ah yeah, So that's when we get all the managers
from council to come through and talk about their budgets
and we can ask some questions. So yeah, I mean
it's a long, big process. I heard the other day
from a business owner. You know, they just can't wait
for the second bridge to get in.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
So, oh, you're telling me I got caught up in
the holiday of traffic getting home on Sunday with two
tied kids in the back. This bridge cannot come soon enough?
Have we made a rod for our own back though,
on the sense that we've done the steal with MCTA
where they're paying for the bridge itself and the charmers
avent which is going to be way more than twenty
million bucks. So that's awesome. We've got to take that.
But they're running the project. So if they say that

(02:43):
is going to cost the money, do we just sort
of have to go, Okay, we'll pay it.

Speaker 2 (02:46):
We can ask questions, of course we can.

Speaker 1 (02:49):
Yeah, yeah, right, and we will I would hope, so.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
Yeah, of course we will. Yeah, no lots of questions.
I mean this is we had our first annual planying
budget day last Tuesday. That was kind of an overview.
Today's where we kind of get more into detail.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
So when do we start the bridge? When we see
the diggers down they're actually doing stuff.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
I have definitely this year. Not sure when, but it
was always sort of early, well, first second quarter of
the year, so yeah, exciting, not too far away hopefully.

Speaker 1 (03:23):
Yeah. What else is sort of big on the radar
the green bins. We talked about the green binch yet.

Speaker 2 (03:29):
So we're talking more about that today. So we've had
a bit of an overview. So yeah, we've just had
an overview on what the predicted rate rise will be
versus our long term plan predictions. And also we've kind
of separated it out to see where where the rate

(03:52):
rises are. So you know that I'm pleased that it's
all going to cour services, which should do so it's
the water, it's roading, and it's the green waste. So yeah,
we're diving deeper today.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Good luck