Te Awamutu CBD
Ange Holt
Constantly beavering away, we continue to progress Community Board decisions.
Of late this has included attending the CommSafe Community Day out at Kihikihi, progressing the Holmes Garage Community Market and Events Place and meeting with council staff regarding the new Rewi Maniapoto playground.
From all the feedback received it sounds like the CommSafe Community Day was a great success, so thank you and well done to the team at CommSafe especially organiser Mandy Merson.
Unfortunately for me I was unable to attend. We were well represented by Kane Titchener, Lou Brown and Bruce Thomas. Sally Whitaker and Jill Taylor also had done a great job of arranging prizes for our survey.
I’d also like to thank all the sponsors of those prizes. It sounds like the team had some great conversations and got some excellent feedback in the surveys, so thanks Kihikihi for sharing with us.
I met with staff to see if we could do something to prevent children running from the Rewi Maniapoto playground onto the road. There were a few good ideas bandied around and I was hopeful we may get something changed.
Unfortunately, with the cycleway going in over the coming months it was decided to not do anything until that was completed. Staff felt that the narrowing of the road, therefore slowing the traffic, widening the footpath and removing parked cars will provide traffic with more visibility and the ability to stop should a child shoot out.
So please parents keep a close eye on your children here and please do not send your children to this playground with younger siblings in their care.
A feasibility study on the Holmes Garage Events and Market Centre at 90 Mahoe St is being completed by the TA Business Chamber and the Community Board.
This will be presented to the Finance & Corporate Committee in November.
The project would provide Te Awamutu with a covered space for markets and community events. It has had an encouraging response to date from the community, with a good deal of strong support on Facebook as a result of the first media article, and from various people and groups we have spoken with to date.
We would really appreciate more community feedback so if you have a group or organisation that you think could be interested in using the space for an event or activity, please let us know.
We’ve had lots of great ideas from people, like various markets, a café foodie night with live music, a place where our kids could have a rock concert for local bands, somewhere for rain sensitive events, a place to hang out during the day and play a piano, giant chess or Jenga, it could display local
artists murals or artwork, maybe the book fair… the list goes on.
We really want this to be a well-used and loved community space that is safe and fun. The plan is to open and close it daily
and provide a town connection with Selwyn Park.
