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The next session starting off with Trevor Anders. Feel free to come up to the— have a seat or stand there at the mic. Got 5 minutes. Leave any time for questions that you want within that. Thank you. Great. Tēnā koutou. Good afternoon, everyone. To confirm, I am Trevor Anders, a member of the Lions Club of Karori, presenting on behalf of the club, which has served the Wellington community for the past 57 years. I was the project leader for our Centenary Legacy Project, which was the formation and financing of the Lines Otari Plant Conservation Laboratory. We worked with the Wellington City Council to locate a site on a stand for a standalone laboratory and financed the cost of the initial premises, namely a new portakom structure, plus most of the essential laboratory equipment. The council provided the site, resource consent services, and some infrastructure upgrade to the surrounds. There were many planning sessions and meetings, all of which I attended. There was support for the project all the way up the WCC hierarchy including from the Chief Operating Officer Barbara Makero, who supplied a letter of support and undertaking to ensure continuance of operation once the lab was handed over. From this go point on 14 November 2017, we had the official opening of the lab on 25 May 2018 by then Mayor Justin Lester. Karori Lions supplied seed finance of over $30k from our projects account and raised the rest, a total of $73,000, following vigorous fundraising efforts, obtaining grants from trusts, other Lions Clubs, and individuals. All those contributions were made with a full understanding that the Wellington City Council would ensure continued operation of the lab. So what happened next? The laboratory thrived and exceeded all our expectations. Under the leadership of Dr. Corinne van der Walt, a range of groundbreaking New Zealand plant-focused work proceeded. Collaboration occurred with other research organizations within Te Papa, DOC Landcare Research, and VUW locally, internationally with such significant organizations as the Kew Millennium Seed Bank in the UK. A number of scientific papers were written, and for such a small laboratory, its reputation has been enviable. The lab has punched well above its weight. We were horrified to hear that the Council has proposed to save the total cost of the lab in the draft budget. As were our network of other Lions and supporters. We can only assume that this idea arose from some level of poor communication or sadly, a lack of appreciation of the value of conservation, of science, of the stated biodiversity and green goals of the Council. The lab, by the way, is not just an asset for Wellington. It's an asset for New Zealand and fitting and a privilege that it is in our capital city. Councillors, you will know the metaphor: we have bred a goose and been delighted that it laid a golden egg. Please do not kill the goose because you don't want to pay for the small amount of food that it eats. We have been encouraged and delighted that the Ataure Wilkins Bush Trust has shown that there is a win-win solution to this situation. In the coming year, approximately half the cost of the lab can be saved while a collaborative effort involving a number of stakeholders would develop a governance and financing structure for the future. There is already substantial buy-in for this. Again, Please do not kill the golden goose. The Wellington public will not forgive you. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you. Thanks, Trevor. Do we have any questions, councillors? Councillor Chung. Thank you very much for coming in this afternoon, really appreciate it. Is there any way that we can actually work through the Lions Club to actually look at a funding model? Is there any possibility there? Well, there are far more competent people to do that sort of analysis than resides in the Lions Club, and that's why I've mentioned the Otari-Wiltons Bush Trust, who do have that sort of people and the network to facilitate that. So our role is, as we see it, is to make sure that the right people get involved and also get the support from the City Council as they well deserve. Great, thank you. Thanks, Trevor. Appreciate you coming in. Thank you. We're now going to move to Parth Sheeth, who is online. Hello, can you all hear me? Yep, we can hear you. Good afternoon. Thank you for your time and the opportunity to speak to you. My name is Parth Sheph. I live in Oriental Bay, and I'm here today to encourage the council to maintain or even expand cycleway funding in the budget, not to cut it. I want to call your attention to a 2024 research paper called the ABCs of Mobility, which examined transport usage data in 800 cities around the world. This research found that Wellington is by a wide margin the least car-dependent city in all of Australasia. If you look at all the journeys taken within the city, half of them were done by car, about 25% by public transit, and 25% by walking or cycling. By comparison, journeys in Auckland and Christchurch were over 80% by car, and in Sydney and Melbourne were over two-thirds by car. What this means is that our actual transport usage here in Wellington is more like European cities than like North American or other Australasian ones. Our transit spending should reflect that reality. Walking, cycling, and public transit make up 50% of all journeys taken here, but they receive far less than 50% of transit spending. Cutting cycleway funding would make that disparity even worse. Global events have also starkly demonstrated how important non-car transport options are. Recent data in Wellington and throughout the country shows a drop in automobile kilometers driven and a significant increase in cycling and public transit use over the past 2 months in response to elevated fuel prices. With prices forecasted to remain high for the foreseeable future, it would be especially foolish to cut spending on cycleways and public transit now and lock in car and fossil fuel dependence for the next decade or more. We are very fortunate here that the previous council invested heavily in cycle and transit improvements, and the city should focus on continuing to build out more infrastructure for pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport users. This would make Wellington much more resilient in the face of global disruption, and it would also help the city keep its climate change commitments. Finally, I wanted to share my personal experience with protected cycleways here in Wellington. I have always been hesitant to cycle on busy urban roads, as are many other people. Um, with the completion of the Island Bay to City Centre cycle route, uh, this has given me the confidence to cycle safely to work and to my kids' daycare, especially when bringing my children along with me. This experience is very common when talking to other people around the city. There's also copious research showing that a major impediment to cycle uptake is safety, and that dedicated cycle infrastructure is crucial, especially for children, women, and novice cyclists. Wellington has done a great job over the past decade building out a network of cycle infrastructure, and the results are very clear. Cycle usage has increased year after year. But the network remains incomplete, with access varying dramatically depending on which suburb you live in. Council should maintain or even increase funding and work towards completing the cycle network as quickly as possible instead of foolishly targeting it for cuts. Thank you. Thank you, Path. Do we have any questions from councillors? Got one from Councillor Chung. Thanks very much for this. I much appreciate it. I noticed that you actually want us to continue funding a lot of these issues, and that's all great, but We are facing a real problem with our budget. So can you suggest anything that you think that we can actually cut to actually try and meet our budget? To be honest, I'm not, you know, on top of the entire finance situation for the city. But I would just note that if you look at the overall transit spending, it's wildly disproportionately slated towards automobile-related spending. Even though, as I mentioned, only 50% of journeys within the city are taken by car. So I would suggest looking at some road spending and redirecting that towards public transit and cyclists. Great, thanks very much. If I— one more? Sure. Okay, you mentioned here talking about the next generation, and I agree, we have to think about the next generation, but the burden of how much money we're borrowing is going to be a huge burden on the next generation. So there is— how would we ever try and reduce that amount if we continue spending on these other issues? Sorry, I'll go. Again, similar to the last question is that we're loading down the next generation with a huge debt and so we've got to try and find some way of actually alleviating that. So have you— can you suggest anything that we could actually do? Do you think that there's something that we're doing that we shouldn't be doing? I actually reject the premise of that question. I think that there's been a huge issue both in Wellington and across the country that councils have chronically underinvested in infrastructure, kicking the can down the road. So I would encourage the council to invest in long-term infrastructure now, as opposed to, you know, letting things like water maintenance and stuff pile up. Secondly, I would again repeat what I said before. The city spends far more than 50% of its overall transport budget on automobile-related infrastructure, despite the fact that 50% of trips are made by public transit, cycles, and walking. So redirecting some funding from automobile-related spending towards cycle and and public transit funding would bring the spending in line with what people actually use here. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks, Parth. Appreciate you tuning in. Next, we'll welcome up James Burgess. Feel free to take a seat or stand at the podium. Kia ora folks, thanks for the opportunity to speak today. I'm here— excuse me— today as a trustee of Akaroa Rebicycle. Many of you will know us as a charity that fixes up bikes to give out to folks. We receive funding by applying for grants through the Climate Sustainability Fund. And I'm here to, to ask for continuation of funding availability through that, noting that of course we'd have to apply alongside other, um, seekers of that. So at Rebicycle, we face more demand than ever. We've got queues at the gate on our bike matching nights. Cost of living, jobs, fuel crisis—all of those things are causing transport poverty, and getting people onto cheap, reliable bike transport is is a great way to offset that. I'd just like to mention a couple of people I served myself recently at some of our nights. There were two brothers who were recently settled in Wellington. One was going to be using his bike to be able to get to school in a reasonable time. He didn't speak English yet. His brother had to interpret for him. So he wasn't going to be able to walk or easily catch a bus that would take him from where he'd been placed, if you like, settled-wise, to his high school. And so this was going to be his way to get to school and to integrate into the community. Another one, a person who received an e-bike from us a couple of years ago, and they rely on it for daily transport to work. They work more than one job, but they're still in relative poverty, as many people are these days. And again, they don't speak English. We have to communicate through Google Translate on the phone. That bike has enabled that person to get to work, to get to their chores, to get to everything else. I can bump into them at the market as they're picking up things and loading them on their bike to go home. They came in, we helped them to fix their bike. They don't have a good transport alternative from their home. They can't afford a car, so this is how they manage to get around. These are just a couple of examples. These bikes help these people thrive, work, contribute to our community, building resilience rather than dependence on other more expensive support that they might end up needing otherwise. So I just wanted to say that without this funding, we'd have to close or scale back so much that we would fail the people who depend on us. We use the funding to arrange part-time professional support for coordinating and some of the more difficult fixing tasks. and that enables efficient work by the large pool of volunteers that we've got to get the most out of things, to get the most of the right bikes to the right people. Community bike groups like ours fulfill needs that can't really be outright profitable. If you say, okay, well, why are we funding this, and why is this being funded, and why are we funding this, I guess, are the questions for you when you've got those difficult decisions against other things that people are asking for. And I hear a whole queue of people saying don't cut our thing, and I recognize that funding is tight. But community bike groups like ours fulfill needs that can't really be outright profitable. Funding is part of the setup wherever these happen and wherever they're successful, and it is seen as something for the good of the community, if you like. We explore every avenue for funding. We don't just rely on funding from this one particular grant source. The overall funding and policy climate means that there's increasing competition for reducing pools of funding. And really, we do everything we can as a group of trustees to try to be again resilient and financially sustainable ourselves, but we depend on this. So thanks for the opportunity to speak. I'm happy for any questions. Thanks, James. We have a question from Councillor Thune.