Posted 22/07/13
Today we saw news of the new retirement village planned by the trust associated with the company which owns Oamaru Hospital. The hospital company is in turn, owned 100% by the council/ratepayers of Waitaki.
I'd like to see more detail, and we will before it can go ahead, but I'm cautiously optimistic that it will be a good thing for the district. Providing of course, we continue to have a well-qualified board looking after it at arms length from the council itself. Does the current board have the skills and expertise to operate such a venture? Probably but they may need some specialist skills to get it completely right.
The other point is that while it's good to look after the ageing population, we need more than rest homes to attract the range of ages and skills to our district which will keep us growing. We need to make it easy for other businesses to come here and set up, employing our people and giving us the larger population to help us have the services we want at an affordable cost. I'd love to see another 5,000 people in the district - a hugely ambitious goal given our relatively fixed population of 20,000 people. How many people do you believe is the right number for our district and for Oamaru?
http://www.odt.co.nz/regions/north-otago/265706/village-hill-aimed-retirees
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