By Selwyn District Mayor Kelvin Coe

On the second anniversary of the September 4 earthquake, this is a good time to think about how far we’ve come as a district.

Memorable to me is hearing about the "random acts of kindness" that people have benefited from over the past two years. More than ever, we’re acting as a true community - looking after our neighbours, welcoming our newcomers and even extending generosity to complete strangers.

Our district’s Community Response Teams and Neighbourhood Support groups are great examples of our people putting their hands up to take responsibility for their neighbours whenever there’s a crisis. They are a vital mechanism for Council to ensure we can reach into the heart of our communities in times of need.

While Selwyn District as a whole might have fewer issues than its city neighbours, there are still ongoing stresses through our recovery. We’re discovering more and more buildings that now don’t meet the basic requirements of the new building code and it looks like we may not be able to afford repairs on some of these community institutions. This will have ongoing repercussions while we plan what we’re going to do to ensure there are sufficient venues for our communities to gather in.

We know there’s been a huge amount of building repairs and new homes. Figures from the Fletchers hub for Selwyn show that some $96.5million has been spent on 3292 completed repairs, out of a total of 7750 repairs to be carried out. So they’ve completed nearly 43% of Selwyn’s repair jobs being carried out by Fletchers.

At the same time, we’re greeting many new faces in our area as city folk choose to come and live in Sensational Selwyn. Recent building consent figures show in the year to the end of June the council processed 616 building consents for new dwellings, compared to 354 the previous year. In July this year alone, 56 new dwelling building consents were issued.

We’re still thinking about the emotional welfare of our residents, including supporting a workshop this weekend in West Melton to talk about the trauma of earthquakes. If you’re interested, contact Dr Olive Webb, owebb@iahs.com or 03 318 0880.

In terms of infrastructure, our next stage of the Pines treatment plant at Rolleston is progressing well - check out the photo in this week’s Council Call (www.selwyn.govt.nz).

I’d like to encourage all our residents to keep offering kindnesses to your neighbours where you can. It’s amazing how far we’ve come already and if we’re working together, we will continue to progress through these difficult times to make our community stronger than ever.

In these difficult times, it’s not only the community who have been stepping up, but also our Selwyn District Council staff and contractors. They’ve had a very different set of tasks and workload over the past couple of years and I appreciate how dedicated they have been.

On behalf of the Selwyn District Council team, I would like to assure our residents that we are here to help. If you need any information, advice, support regarding earthquake recovery, please contact us on 03 347 2800 or 03 318 8338.