The St Albans Community Website

The March edition of St Albans News may be slimmer than usual but it’s packed inside with plenty of small stories. The main feature has been given over to the tale of how the St Albans Residents Association (SARA) was reborn to fight the government’s first attempt at running a motorway through St Albans. It involved a former mayor and a newly-minted dame. The Kohinga Mara pantry has been completed and is now on the St Albans Community Centre forecourt in Colombo St where passersby can find fresh fruit and vegetables from the centre’s garden or donated from other St Albans gardens. SARA is beginning a journey to make the centre zero waste by partnering with Para Kore.

St Albans and Christchurch lost kaumātua Terry Ryan when he died in October. With the help of others in Otautahi who knew him, we recall his life’s work. Looks like there will be a long and expensive wait for a solution to the flooding in the lowest parts of St Albans and there’s likely to be a queue for such work given the city sinking after the quakes and seas rising with climate change. The St Albans community centre won a national architecture award for its building, mainly for the way it sequesters carbon, a building for the future and lots more. Click on the image to the right to download and view the December/January pdf pages.

The October issue (being delivered to local letterboxes from October 1) is a bit smaller than usual but fits in news about the housing standoff between the city council and government over the extent of the intensification needed and the severely limited influence city residents can exert. And a local resident has come up with a plan to ease traffic in Francis Ave. And it looks like it might be a few more years and more flooding to come before a permanent solution is finalised to deal with flooding in Edgeware Rd. To find out more, download and read the October issue of St Albans News, just click the image to the right.

The September issue (being delivered to letterboxes on September 1) is largely devoted to local body elections. It features mayoral candidates, councillors, community board member candidates and Environment Canterbury candidates. In some non-election news Residents associations are banding together to ask the council to give greater emphasis to things like greenery and green space when deciding what will be prioritised in the new district plan. To find out more, download and read the September issue of St Albans News, just click the image to the right.

Fans of the Edgeware Pool are celebrating the council allocation of extra funding for the Edgeware Pool that will reduce the amount the pool group still needs to raise to construct the pool. It could even be operating in 18 months, so it will be a year of full-on fundraising to raise the final million dollars. The Government is getting serious about organising recycling and waste management on a nationwide basis. We take a quick look at a few more places closer to home that specialise in finding new uses for particular items. Find more local news stories, such some of the rhododendrons in Abberley Park turning brown and dying in the latest St Albans News edition – just click the image to the right.

Residents of Christchurch inner green suburbs, like St Albans and Richmond are sick of houses being demolished and replaced with ugly concrete blocks, tarseal and shrubs. One Christchurch resident, who has organised a petition, thinks we should demand the council ditch the district plan proposal and rewrite it so that the inner city is developed first and when vacant land in the CBD runs out then start looking at inner suburbs.There is plenty of time to incorporate plans to allow 4-6 or more storeys in a later plan review. And while they are gradually disappearing in St Albans there’s a feature on trees in centre pages. Read all this and more in the latest St Albans News edition- just click the image to the right.