Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil would like your views on the draft Long Term Plan 2012–22. The draft plan sets out what the Coun­cil is pro­pos­ing to do over the next ten years. Pub­lic con­sulta­tion on the Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil Draft Long Term Plan runs from the 16th April to 18th May 2012. This is your chance to have a say – your sup­port will make all the dif­fer­ence.

There are a whole bunch of things involved in the long term plan that the Wel­ling­tonista col­lect­ively and indi­vidu­ally have opin­ions on. Hope­fully there will be more posts about those soon. But today I’d like to talk to you about an issue that’s super close to my heart*: get­ting the Wel­ling­ton SPCA into a new build­ing so that they can con­tin­ue to provide an amaz­ing ser­vice for the com­munity.

If you’ve been to the New­town centre, you’ll know that while it is full of ador­able anim­als and really ded­ic­ated people, it is also crazy cramped, old and fall­ing-downy. The small space means that it’s that much harder to have prop­er isol­a­tion spaces to pre­vent dis­eases from spread­ing, and there’s no room for new ini­ti­at­ives. It’s also down a really long pot-holed drive­way, and there’s very little park­ing around.

Mean­while, the old Fever Hos­pit­al up in Mount Vic­tor­ia is sit­ting empty apart from van­dals. Here’s the situ­ation in the words of Wel­ling­ton SPCA:

The Fever Hos­pit­al on Alex­an­dra Road (also known as the Old Chest Hos­pit­al and owned by Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil), a his­tor­ic­ally-rich Her­it­age build­ing in the heart of Wel­ling­ton, remains the pre­ferred des­tin­a­tion for us. The Coun­cil have stated that we are the pre­ferred ten­ant and have voiced a desire to see us in the build­ing as soon as pos­sible.

The Fever Hos­pit­al site will provide a her­it­age home for a her­it­age com­munity organ­isa­tion. It will con­vert a dis­used human hos­pit­al to an anim­al one with an edu­ca­tion­al focus. Loc­ated in the centre of the cap­it­al it places us where we need to be; at the heart of the com­munity.

Wel­ling­ton City Coun­cil have exist­ing oblig­a­tions to com­plete a large amount of cap­it­al works on the build­ing before we can com­mence our own con­struc­tion work, and ongo­ing main­ten­ance once the build­ing is ten­an­ted.

Unfor­tu­nately the Coun­cil has decided it does not have the funds avail­able to com­plete this work, nor is there fund­ing budgeted for the next 10 years.

Obvi­ously, the coun­cil has to think care­fully about where it spends its money, but Wel­ling­ton SPCA, which does vital work but receives no dir­ect** gov­ern­ment fund­ing, is abso­lutely deserving. For more inform­a­tion and/or to sign a peti­tion, check out the Rehome the SPCA site.

* Full dis­clos­ure: I worked for the Wel­ling­ton SPCA for a couple of months last year, and I con­tin­ue to foster cats for them.

** Anim­al inspect­ors are trained by MAF, but that’s it.