It’s round two for Christchurch Mayor Lianne Dalziel.

She wants to fast track development in the suburbs and accelerate plans to have 20,000 people living in the central city.

Well, she’s got a lot of agencies to help her. There’s the Government owned Otakaro Limited, that’s supposed to be their job.

There’s Regenerate Christchurch, which is supposed to revitalise New Brighton, and there’s Development Christchurch, a council owned organisation doing similar things.

Lianne has admitted the two agencies probably should merge, as they’re essentially doing the same thing. I agree. Her priority should be to investigate rate-payer wastage and sort that out first.

Lianne told me her greatest achievement was opening up the council books and getting the city’s insurance issues sorted. Now it’s time to provide confidence for the people of Christchurch and make meaningful change where we can physical progress.

The council needs to show some real power and clean up the city. And that’s why voter turnout was low. The Government maintains control over the central city and most of the anchor projects, so why bother voting for people who don’t have any power?

There’s nothing stopping the council from cleaning up the mess on the corner of Brougham and Colombo Streets. That’s unacceptable and shows how ineffective the council can be.

It has the power to clean up whatever it deems to be a mess.

Councillors on the East need to visit New Brighton beach, once a week, and make sure the rubbish bins aren’t overflowing. They also need to meet with those fixing the roads and provide residents and the media with detail on timelines for when they’ll be completely repaired.

The council needs to show it cares, and support local business in the CBD, by cleaning up temporary car parks and make sure the area doesn’t smell like the bog of eternal stench from Labyrinth.

The days of saying “we need greater community engagement” are over. People don’t care about buzz words and sentences, they just want things done and perception is reality.

The trouble with some of the council members is that they think money grows on trees. Many of them voted in favour of more councillors. That was a disaster for the rate-payer. Now we have three more councillors. Four returned unopposed.