At one point after the earthquakes, I had the insurance company telling me that it wanted to replace the driveway before the sewer line that ran under it had been repaired. 

When I explained to them that, maybe, that wasn’t the most practical way of doing things —that it might make more sense to wait until the underground work had been done before putting the nice new driveway down— they agreed.  

If only the Christchurch City Council had someone giving the same advice. Because it very obviously needs it, with news that it’s digging up a road it spent just under $1 million re-sealing 10 months ago, to replace a water main.    

Last October the council spent $936,000 re-sealing Glandovey Road, in Fendalton. It's now digging up the road to replace a water main and that work is going to cost ratepayers $1.9 million.     

Mayor Phil Mauger says it’s an “embarrassment” for a council trying to build public trust and confidence. Is it ever. 

He’s saying: “It’s an absolute embarrassment to me and the council. It really is not good. The shit is going to hit the fan.”  

But it’s a bit more than an “embarrassment”. It’s yet another example of why all those council candidates around the place are wasting their breath, and wasting their advertising, and wasting their signage costs telling us to vote for them to keep the rates down.  

They can bang-on about that as much as they like but, when their council does stupid stuff like this, they can forget about keeping the rates down.  

The council’s infrastructure general manager, Brent Smith, says the upcoming water main and sub pipe renewals were "unforeseen" and that, where possible and practical, the council tries to do capital and maintenance work at the same time. But when Glandovey Road was resealed, there was no water main work scheduled.  

Not needed, scheduled, there’s a difference there. Because wouldn’t you think that if you were going to spend close to $1 million re-surfacing a road, you’d check a few things to make sure there wasn’t anything else that could be done at the same time? 

Roger Cumming, who lives on Glandovey Road, thinks so. He reckons the council must have known about the state of the water main before it did the re-sealing work back in October, because pipes were bursting there quite often.  

Roger says sometimes there were two blow-outs in one day. This was happening before the council re-sealed the road and afterwards. 

He says it’s a waste. Mayor Phil Mauger says it’s an embarrassment. But I’d say it’s incompetence.