Letters to the Editor

 

Cames Road danger
Do people realise that should the Insley Road Bridge close, the only way into Mangawhai, apart from through Kaiwaka, will be Cames Road?

Cames Road is about 5 km long with half a kilometre one way and most of it is badly maintained metal and badly drained. Why is it like this? Because Kaipara District Council is burying its head in the sand and has let developers off the hook. Cames Road has many developments and another 14 coming on stream.

I would like to know what the so-called chief road engineer does for his six figure income apart from not being available on the phone.

Kaipara District Council, stop ignoring this problem. There have been many accidents and not all reported, some have gone through fences and managed, so far, to escape injury. Trucks and cars use Cames Road as a through road going to Lawrence, Devich, Upper Tara, Garbalino, Hilltop, Browns roads. You say “why live on such a road”, when we moved here Cames Road was only 2.6 km long from Te Ari end. We had no problems then.

Cames Road is a dangerous road and Jason Smith and the Kaipara District Council don't care.  When the bridge is closed you will all have to drive over Cames Road.

When someone is killed on Cames Road maybe Kaipara District Council will get off their backsides.

Shouldn't Cames Road be top of the list because of the state of the bridge?

Owen Blundell
Wellsford

Selfish killing shellfish
How is it that these few (pictured) think they have an inherent right to drive their heavy vehicles across shellfish breeding grounds, potentially crushing millions of juvenile shell fish, then to pillage what is left of the mature population. 

Great Grandfather’s memoir (1900’s) states that most of the middle ground, ‘the tidal exposed area’, was full of pipi, tuatua, and cockles, even up to the last generation. These are part of a food chain for wildlife, the stingray rarely seen here today because its food is almost gone, the whale also gone, due to its food no longer here. 

I have contacted the harbour master and the Council but they have deaf ears. We who have been lucky enough to look down on the estuary for 60 years see vehicles there too often. It is unfair that driving vehicles can carry many people and multiple containers, whilst the Maori folk took only what they could carry, the locals who walk over also. 
We have also found bucket loads dumped on the ground – dead and dying – by selfish individuals who have no altruistic care for others or their environment. 

Bevan Lawrence
Mangawhai