As we look back on another year of What’s On Invers, let’s reflect on some of our news stories that made the headlines.
Flicking back through my notebook (nowadays it’s Notebook LM – yes we’ve embraced AI as our ‘assistant.’ With this latest technology if you snooze, you lose.
Where once press releases could be turned around in 10-15 minutes, it now literally takes seconds. But luckily, we’ll still have some ‘real’ news thrown in for good measure too.
We started 2025 writing about $11 cauliflowers – which prompted the Mayor to push for just a 2.3% rates increase – the lowest in the country. But a month later council staff came back 9.47%.
Nobby Clark hovered around 3.9% for while, and then eventually conceded with 7.7% – still considerably lower than neighbouring districts now all in double figures.
Council was getting interesting. Early in the year a pilot recycled bin inspection initiative forced inspectors to wear body cameras, after reporting hostility out in the community, so are now able to record incidents.
Hundreds of distressed customers and staff working in the South City mall were pinged with $85 parking fines – often more than once in a day, when an aggressive parking campaign kicked off in June.
Glasines restaurant and bar owner Matt Smellie got involved and started putting the acid on the mall owner – also a Queenstown businessman whom he’d had dealings with before.
He said the landlord had taken things too far and he and other businesses had been losing customers as a result.
The parking campaign soon fell over after push back from the community – funded legally by businesss owners, and the mall owner realised he’d made an error of judgement.
In July, city councillors became nervous about its inner city clock project when they heard the upgrade was likely close to $2 million.
Cr Ian Pottinger likened the new design to being more suitable for a ‘Burning Man’ event than to being representative of the CBD.
As we got closer to election time, some interesting candidates came out of the woodwork. One was Nobby Clark’s brother who decided to register under Andrew rather than Maxwell, in the hope that nobody would recognise him.
Then along came Gordon McCrone – who the media tried to eat for breakfast, and who Invercargill leaders banned from the Great Debate leading up to the election, after he posted dangerous and sexually disturbing content online.
We welcomed Tom Campbell as the new Mayor of the city who quickly got to work dealing with a State of Emergency when the October storm hit.
Causing $2.394 million worth of damage across the city, whatsoninvers.nz made national news with founder Mike Sanford caught right in the eye of the storm and able to capture live footage of the event along Queens Drive.
A month later and councillors decided that some of those big macrocarpa trees would have to come down – another $930,000.
We ended the year with average weather and more FENZ strikes – here’s hoping our fire engines don’t break down soon – some are up to 20 years old.
Have a wonderful break everyone and I look forward to writing more in the New Year.
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