My building consent officer has now gone on holiday, handing my case over to some poor guy who now has to deal with a custometr that’s angry like a snake. Just to ensure it stays hard, it seems nobody thought handing my case over properly was necessary. That is unprofessional. Now I am re-sending all the information to a new officer, asking the same questions that I was told had been resolved.

Again I state that the good people in the Council are very good – some have come to me and expressed disgust at the way I have been treated, but the fact of the matter is that if something doesn’t change soon this town is looking at a dead Central City for the next 50 years. If you let engineers design things in the current risk averse climate, you will have a city whose character is no different from Riccarton Mall.

So I scrap on, day in day out, all day long sending off stupid information so some dropkick can tick boxes. But I can’t help but wonder what it is like for people that don’t have the old Irish mad-dog fighter in them.

Here’s one of my favourite conversations of late:

Me: “You need to understand, it’s just a bus and a couple of portable buildings.”

Council employee: “It’s not a bus, it’s a building.”

“Trust me, it’s a bus. It has a warrant and registration.”

“That might be the case, but it’s a building.”

“No, it’s definitely a bus.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think. To us it’s a building.”

“Do you want me to come and pick you up in the building. We can drive around town in the building and see if we can’t resolve this.”

“Don’t be smart with me…”

Half way through our conversation I realised I was getting some use from my useless university education. As far as I can tell this arguement could be framed using Aristotle’s ideas of Matter and Form. What is it about a bus that gives it it’s “busness”? Does a bus become a building if it plays the role of a building? If you sit on a table does it become a chair?

I thought “this is interesting, it could be a fun debate”, but I suspect someone who went from a boring degree to a boring job might not have had the inclination to study Greek philosophy. So I told him people like him were killing the city and hung up.

Tune in next week when I become Michael Laws and the Christchurch City Council actually eats itself.

I have spent the past few months trying to obtain a building consent to put a bus, a caravan, and two portable buildings on a property in the city. The site is to be wrapped in scaffold to keep the wind out and create a “building” using a material that is everywhere in the city in a novel fashion.

The Planning department was my first stop. They were super helpful and supportive and guided me through the process. I got the impression that Council wanted businesses that had been destroyed in the quake to remain in the city and would facilitate this happening. Thanks to everyone in planning, you made my life easy and gave me hope.

Then I hit building consent, a department that would make a Monty Python skit look sensible and predictable. From the first point of contact they were unhelpful, restrictive, dogmatic, small-minded and determined to ensure I incurred as many unnecessary costs as possible.

Let me say that my intention is not to do anything that is in any way unsafe. I had a proper fire report and structural engineers have looked at the scaffolding and done all their complicated calculations to ensure it wouldn’t blow over in the wind or fall over in an earthquake.

But… the Council needs to see that a couple of portable buildings on a piece of empty land is different from the erection of a multi-storey permanent building. I am getting hit with the same consent requirements as I would if I were building the Empire State Building. This is silly and expensive and every time another fucking engineer has a bright idea that I need to prove something else it costs me thousands of dollars in fees.

If I’m not there you will have a car park for the next two years.

I managed to get to the head of department and he is a lovely, reasonable, pragmatic bloke. He helped me through what I saw as the tail end of my application. I thought there was light at the end of the tunnel. After weeks of silly fighting over paperwork, I thought I was there. I had held my tongue in public because all I wanted was to get my consent and get trading again.

No.

Today’s development is that the Council engineers “don’t have the expertise” to deal with our application from a structural point of view. As such, they have farmed it out to an external consultant – passing on the fees to me – so that some expert can look at whether a portable toilet and kitchen are safe. Maybe wind on a scaffold is too tough for the mediocre engineers that end up working there, but really, you should be able to handle a couple of portable buildings.

It is the passing on of time and cost without a care in the world that is rotten and horrible. If you aren’t competent to look at an application, maybe hire someone that is – give them some of that fat pay-rise that Big Tony has so kindly handed half back.

It seems to be nobody’s fault that they are operating in such a dysfuncional fashion. I have come across good people within the organisation that understand my predicament and sympathise with me. I thank these people for their support, but I can see good people getting nowhere. So, somebody needs to be held accountable for just how fucked up the Council has become, operating like it’s business as usual and driving small businesses broke.

So, I’m blaming Tony and Bob. When the head of the fish is rotten, the rest soon follows. There has been a monumental failure of leadership and if all the staff I talk to are not responsible, then somebody has to be. So “thank-you” to all the staff who have been helpful. I mean that. I can see when good people are in a bad place. But someone is at fault and while it might be nice to fly home to Hamilton after a hard days work, some of us are stuck here trying to rebuild our lives. if you’re so good at management how about you fix this broken monster.

That is why I was at the protest. To shout my dissatisfaction at the side of a building and join with others around me in saying “Something has to change. For some of us this is our home, not just a job.”

So, bar staff, kitchen staff, part time, full time… Whatever you’re looking for, flick me an email and we can take it from there.

My email is johnny(at)goodbyebluemonday.co.nz.

Nobody tried to steal our scaffold which was lucky; Greg had brought a knife.

If you’re in the neighbourhood and we’re about on site, stop by for a beer. It would be nice to rant to somebody about how shit the Council are.

Thanks to Matty J for the sweet camper.

So, I’m hoping the hard work is behind me. We have secured a site. The Council seem to be playing ball. Construction has begun and we hope to be open shortly.

Goodbye Blue Monday has finally made it onto the immediate demolition list which is shit for the building but makes getting insurance money a lot easier. I went into the Red Zone last week to see what Sam at C1 is doing and it is like a wasteland in there. We are going to need pioneers like him to get that part of the city on its feet again.

This will spell the end of Goodbye Blue Monday. I didn’t want to take the name to our new site as people would have just complained that the new place isn’t as good as the old. Tim has moved on and the Council has indicated it is anti live music; so the next spot will be something different. I quite like the idea of GBM being mythologised and never having to go through that cycle all bars go through where they eventually get shit.

We are calling the new site Smash Palace which we think is fitting in the current environment. Currently it is a flat bit of land on the corner of Victoria St and Bealey Ave. The plan is to create something temporary that will be on that site for at least a year. Following this, we hope to pack it up and relocate it on GBM’s old site. But if the last 12 months has taught me anything, it’s that long-term plans often work out quite different to what you had envisaged.

So here’s GBM as it stood last week. I love the old sign that has been uncovered by the building next door coming down. I thought it was hilarious that it sold sperm but Tony d tells me this was quite a common type of oil in the olden days.

Here is a picture of me smashing a Waynzo hotdog for breakfast. Living the dream…

At our new bar, Rosie will be all grown up and operate her own caravan. I will wait ’til she has finalised her menu etc. before announcing too much, but I thought I’d let you all know that we have gone and picked up her caravan off the ferry in Picton, towed it back, and she is in the process of setting it up.

It’s all very exciting to us to finally have some forward momentum in a year where it feels like we have constantly been knocked backward.

Here’s the caravan on the way home.

Sorry I haven’t written in a long time. It has been weeks and months of frustrations down here and I began to loose sight of reopening the bar. GBM still stands smashed in the city, while we sit and wait for insurance to come to the party. We can’t get paid out because it is still there and we have been struggling to re-open anywhere else due to lack of funds. We went to the bank to borrow money. They didn’t want any of our houses as collateral due to them all being quake damaged… So, yes, it has been tough.

But this post isn’t to grizzle about how hard it has been. It is to announce that an anonymous funder has lent us some money, the bank has loaned a smaller sum against my Riley and Recover Canterbury have been very helpful. On this note, we have bought a bus which we are currently converting into a bar. We have bought a caravan to serve as a kitchen and we have hopefully secured a site within the city. All going according to plan (which history has taught me never happens), we will be announcing our site over the next week or so. Following this, I would love to say that we will be open this summer. All it’s hinging on now is for the Council to approve our site and plans.

I will seek to keep you all up-to-date with progress and hopefully we will all be drinking vast quantities of Bodgie Beer again soon. Thanks for all the support and for sticking with us. Here is a photo of the May family in front of our bus (which they have parked on their neighbours drive).

I live in the city. Right on the edge of the Cordon. I think about 15 people are living in my entire block at the moment. Round here it’s like a sideshow during the day with rubberneckers, while at night the streets are deserted. This can be nice when you and a bunch of like minded idiots feel like riding dodgy dirt bikes with no mufflers up and down the back street at break-neck speeds for short intervals before hurriedly heading back behind the gate, sure the police must be on their way.

At the end of the night the Garage was good and full. It made me so proud and I asked Mark to take a beautiful photograph of that moment. I was quite pissed by then.

Bikes in the Garage