New hands on Our Town Motueka's tiller

September 15th, 2013
[by David Armstrong]

Howie Timms has passed on the chairmanship of Our Town Motueka to BNZ Bank manager Dave Moloney after seven years of dedicated service to the business support group.

At OTM's annual general meeting on Friday Howie carried out his announced intention to move back to a committee role. Long-serving treasurer John Murphy also said that this would be his last year in that role.

In his report to the meeting, Howie said that the past 12 months had seen a big change in OTM's focus, brought on in part by the resignation earlier this year of the permanent administrator Lori Keller.

The committee had decided to use that event to refocus away from trying to coordinate and engage with business owners and into working harder to get more discretionary spending into Motueka businesses - "to get consumers to spend more dollars locally".

The foregone salary of the coordinator will now be spent on more advertising, plus two big projects to set up an irrigation system for hanging flower baskets along High Street (about $20,000) and installing wifi throughout the business district.

Howie thanked OTM secretary Linda Woodgate for "stepping up big time after Lori left" and keep the organisation running.

The main OTM promotion activities this year have been a Shop and Win programme (a cash prize for local shoppers) and further advertising on More FM for shopping in Motueka.

With less pressure on the bank account after Lori's departure, the meeting agreed that the targeted business rate collected by council on OTM's behalf will remain at $51,000 this year.

In general business, one business owner complained at length that retail dollars in the town this off-season has been the worst ever, telling the committee to do something about it. However, he gave no answers and did not offer himself for work on the committee.

The meeting ended with a report by committee member Kendall Riley on a survey sent out last month to OTM members for their employees to fill out, about their shopping habits. They were asked to indicate for about a dozen product and service categories whether they shopped in Motueka always, occasionally and never.

The 400-plus surveys sent out to employers provided answers from 19 of them, which totalled 84 people, about 75% of whom said they lived within 5km of Motueka.

These were heavily weighted to the 50-plus age group, reinforcing the perception that jobs in the town do not cater well enough for younger people - which Kendall pointed out was a real concern.

Several business sectors were seen to be poorly patronised by town people who seem to prefer to travel to the city or buy on the internet, while others including the likely suspects of groceries, fast food and hairdressing are still the main outlet for most local people.

Anyone wanting to see the detailed results of the survey should contact Kendall at Abel Tasman Outdoors.

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