A “do it once” mentality meant extra work went into the recent $2.45m Baring Square East upgrade in Ashburton, Canterbury. During the redevelopment of the square in front of Te Whare Whakatere, the new library and civic centre, the Ashburton District Council also completed additional work. This included rubbish bin upgrades and new bike racks, which infrastructure and open spaces general manager Neil McCann said were “absorbed by existing budgets”. The extras required some upfront expenditure from existing renewal or maintenance budgets but it had the benefit of “not having to come back and d ..read more

How much green waste the Ashburton District sends to landfill will be investigated before introducing kerbside green waste collection. It is estimated that green waste makes up around 40% of the district’s general wast. The Ashburton District Council is planning to introduce green waste collection in 2026, to align with a new waste management contract. It has to start collecting household food waste by 2027 under government legislation, but in the long-term plan, the council is proposing to expand that to a food and organic waste collection se ..read more

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At the last bi-monthly meeting of the Ashburton Museum & Historical Society (AMHS), on Sunday 5 March, we celebrated the launch of Whakatere Heritage Collections Online, a new online collections research website. Currently, the website hosts over 1,000 photograph records from the AMHS’ collection, and several dozen references to archival material from the Ashburton District Council’s archive collection. More records are gradually being prepared for online access, including archives, photographs, and object records. All of this would not have been possible without much hard work having bee ..read more

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The story of lifelong friends who fell out over a borrowed Nissan Sunny played out in the Ashburton District Court on Tuesday. Tia Carla Mayla Winitana appeared before Judge Campbell Savage for a judge-alone trial, having earlier denied a charge of taking a vehicle for her own use. The 44-year-old claimed she was unable to return the car because someone from North Canterbury, who she refused to name, had it. Winitana claimed she had paid $500 to get the car back and had planned to return it to her friend. But the police stopped her two days after collecting the car, and before she'd managed t ..read more

Danielle Fraser claimed sunstrike was a factor after plowing into the back of a car containing a mother and three children at 100kmh. But Judge Campbell Savage says it was a lack of attention, rather than glare, that led to the crash at an intersection on State Highway One, near Hinds, last year. Fraser, 28, appeared in the Ashburton District Court this week for a judge-alone trial on a charge of careless driving causing injury. The court heard that on April 25, she was driving home from Christchurch Airport in the late afternoon after visiting her parents in Auckland. She had the cruise cont ..read more