Ratepayers to fund air pollution

Press, 5 February 1986, Page 9

Ratepayers to fund air pollution

Canterbury ratepayers will have to pay $36,350 to fund the Canterbury United Council’s air pollution committee this year.

This local body contribution has risen 10 per cent on last year’s, even though the committee’s total budget has been reduced from last year’s $125,900 to $68,150. The axing of Govern-ment-funded project employment programme schemes has caused most of this year’s drop, the committee’s secretary, Mr Ted Maguire, told an air pollution committee meeting yesterday. Last year $50,000 had been allocated for P.E.P. work. No money was available for the schemes this year. The committee underspent its budget last year by about $44,000, said Mr Maguire after the meeting. This was because only about $lO,OOO of the $50,000 allocated for P.E.P. work had been

spent. The decrease in the committee’s budget meant that some activities it had planned to start this year would be postponed. Plans to monitor and control noise pollution from traffic and vehicleexhaust emissions were two areas where the committee would be reduced to lobbying Government departments for support and resources, rather than planning direct controls. The budget restraints meant the committee would spend more time consolidating its previous activities than planning new ventures, said the United Council’s chief executive, Mr Malcolm Douglass. Mr Douglass said that the whole structure of United Council funding was due to change after local body restructuring, and so this year would be a good time to pause between new and old policies.

The committee’s objective this year would be to finish updating a D.S.I.R. report on air pollution in Christchurch. This report was made in the 1960 s and it urgently needed updating so that the committee had a base to work from in future. Clean air publicity would be its other priority. It wanted to push clean air advertising harder at the start of winter, using print advertising as well as television. The committee’s chairman, Mr Geoff Marriner, said he was delighted that publicity money had not been cut drastically in the budget It had dropped, $3OOO to $35,000, but this was still acceptable. “Usually publicity is th§ first area to be cut because you can’t cut wages and salary costs,” he said. The committee needed to spend as much as it; could afford to advertise clean air.