Tēnā koutou

Radio test this Saturday 9:30am 25 January 2025.

Happy New year / ngā mihi o te tau hou

I guess the first piece of news if you haven't heard is the Local Government Commission have concluded that the Eastbourne and Wainuiomata Community Boards should be retained at least for the next triennium (3 years) - so we have breathing space but cannot get complacent. Petone Community Board will be disestablished unfortunately. The Commission found that both Eastbourne and Wainuiomata are significant communities of interest, and in our case our physical vulnerability was seen as a significant factor, so our resilience and ability to respond to emergencies were arguments to retain the board - something to work on.

No contact or communications with HCC or WREMO on this or anything else so far.

I know some of you have been away but I'd like to be sure everyone is still getting these, that you are happy to stay involved, and confirm your contact details (address, phone) - so if you haven't, could you just reply to this - and of course any feed back is welcome.

Eastbourne Website updates

You may be aware that the website https://eastbourne.nz has a number of alerts on the home page (just check the right hand side of the home page).

These are generated and periodically updated (every few minutes to every few days depending on the nature of the data) - some calculated, some via email subscriptions, some by "scraping" web pages, some by using APIs (Application Programming Interface - the correct way to make this data available for this type of use - essentially a computer-to-computer protocol).

Trying to decode web pages or emails using code can be unreliable, especially if the information is hand written and subject to human foibles such as grammar and spelling, but I do my best. While I work on organisations to get access to more accessible and reliable data I have no other option, so if you do notice any errors or omissions, on screen or compared to what you know is correct through other channels, I'd appreciate a message as obviously incomplete or incorrect information is not great.

Also, if you know of any information that could be useful to the community please let me know - I'm keen to improve/add data - and the possibility of a community app with alerting is also an option. 

FYI - I also manage the website https://eastbourne.nz/ and the electronic notice board in the library - if you have information you'd like to see on either of these please let me know. I have got pages for each bay which have no content - the obvious addition would be information about the bay's emergency resources, plan and contacts etc. so please send anything through.

Note: There are a few Eastbourne email newsletters you can subscribe to here, including one for civil defence notifications.