Elections: Readers have their say

Dunedin voters have until noon tomorrow to decide who they want on their city council.

We talked to three Otago Daily Times readers about candidates' calls for a more sustainable council, and asked them what they understood sustainability to mean and how the council could get it right.

To me, sustainability means ensuring what can be recycled is recycled through the system, or we manage our resources, whatever they may be, with great care and respect for the environment.

It also means doing what we can in policy and actions to acknowledge our stewardship over resources and using them responsibly and without harming the environment.

This can be achieved by setting out to have policies that look after the environment, and by promoting environmentally friendly practices, products and services.

Part of this is using those policies to build up the local economy so that real, local sustainability can be achieved. It also means no extreme spending, no boom-and-bust stuff.

Is it sustainable to generate a more than $300 million debt, and then expect that to come from rates or swanky investments, putting more pressure on the economy? That's where sustainability gets harder to achieve.

I think they need to conduct a review of all their activities to see just how sustainable we are before launching into anything that commits us to new sustainability initiatives.

That might be a big job, but it might be best for the council to talk to other councils that are recognised as sustainable cities - there is no point reinventing the wheel when every dollar spent counts.

We also need to be mindful of the fact that sustainability will be hard won.

There will be people out there with fantastic ideas, but to take them all would be very costly, so maybe we need to have an incremental, staged approach to make sure all the decisions are the right ones.

Having an affordable sustainability model is important, because if it is unaffordable, then it won't continue.

That's not sustainable.

To me, the sustainability I grew up with is being able to do enough to keep things as they are, to keep an equilibrium that is of benefit to us.

I wonder sometimes whether it is a word or a phrase that means many different things to different people, and at the moment it is a word used in elections but needs some thought to be followed through.

To me, a sustainable city is handed to new generations in a position where it is no worse than it was before the previous generation took it, or that it is much better.

That should always be the goal of the council. It is something that should be behind everything the council does.