It seems to me that the Christchurch City Council has really got it in for the Arts Centre. 

For starters, when the Arts Centre asked for $20 million in council support over the next 10 years, the council said “yeah, nah” and gave it just under $6 million instead. 

Now, it wants to sting the Arts Centre $18,000 for increasing the number of food trucks operating there.  

The council says the charge is for “added stress” on its transport network that will be caused by the extra food trucks rolling into town, which is out-and-out nonsense as far as I’m concerned.  

And the council needs to be told to pull its head in and stop trying to punish the Arts Centre for doing exactly what the council wants to happen, which is attract more people to the central city. 

It’s especially bad when you consider how hypocritical all this is – I’ll get to that in a second. But here’s what’s happened: 

The Arts Centre decided that, since the council wasn’t going to give it the extra funding it says it needs, it started to think about how it could generate some extra income itself. And it decided to get more food trucks on site, the idea being that it would bring more people into the Arts Centre and get people spending more. A win-win, you would think.  

So good on the Arts Centre for not sitting around whinging and getting on with the job itself of trying to bring in some extra money. 

Of course, if it wanted to have more food trucks it needed to get resource consent. So it went to the council, wanting consent to have up to 33 food trucks there. The council wasn’t fussed with that and so, between them, they agreed it would be cool to have up to 25 food trucks. 

So compromise reached: more food trucks, more people, more money spent. Brilliant. 

Until the council got back in touch and told the Arts Centre that, because there’d be more food trucks rolling into town, that would put “added stress” on its transport network. And because of that added stress, it would be billing the Arts Centre $18,000.   

But here’s what makes it even worse. Here’s where the hypocrisy comes into it.  

Do you remember a couple of years ago —nearly three years ago now it was— and the Destiny Church was running those anti-vax protests in the centre of town? They called themselves the Freedom and Rights Coalition and they had those protest marches in November and December 2021, and January and February 2022. 

They got quite feral at times. And the problem the city council had with them was that it wasn’t notified beforehand. Which other protest organisers do, apparently. 

And so, because of that, the council hit the Freedom and Rights Coalition and the Destiny Church with a $50,000 bill for doing traffic management during these protests. 

Which is fine, but, at the last minute, the council backed down and told this outfit to forget about the $50,000 bill and ripped up the invoices. 

And this is what really riles me about what the council’s doing to the Arts Centre. It wants to charge the Arts Centre $18,000 for showing some initiative and trying to get more people going there and spending more with more food trucks. The council’s quite happy to effectively fine an outfit for doing something positive, when it’s the same outfit that told the Freedom and Rights Coalition that they didn't have to pay their $50,000 bill. 

The hypocrisy is staggering. And the council needs to get on the phone to the Arts Centre, apologise for its hypocrisy, give it credit for trying to get more going on in the centre of town, and tell it to forget about paying this stupid bill.