Bay Buzz
While no issues are off-limits to BayBuzz their ongoing coverage focuses in these four areas: Environment — protecting the #1 asset of the Bay, with special attention these days to Ocean Beach and Bay water quality issues.
Spending — looking closely at how and why, and how well, Councillors spend your money, and how closely their spending matches your priorities. Health — assessing the role of the District Health Board in ensuring the quality of our health care here in the Bay. Accountability — investigating who our elected officials are listening to on occasions when they appear to be ignoring the public.
Rattling Cages
The mission of Bay Buzz is rattling cages, having fun, bringing more accountability to public affairs, offering a different voice to Hawke’s Bay, providing a forum for the citizens of HB to sound off. We hope to cross-pollinate ideas and information about life in Hawkes Bay, create a buzz and occasionally sting.
Bay Buzz is Tom Belford, a transplanted American, living with my wife and daughter (plus married son and wife) in Hawke’s Bay since January 2005. He has a lifestyle block along the Tuki Tuki with a growing menagerie of animals. In the States, he worked chiefly in Washington in politics and public advocacy, developing strategies to raise funds and promote a wide range of causes including the environment, women’s rights, human rights, government accountability, civil liberties and international relief.
He served in the Carter White House and worked for Ted Turner in his pre-billionaire days, which should date me a bit! Fancy myself to be knowledgeable about marketing and new media. Write a blog for political/cause marketers called The Agitator.
Fellow Bay Buzzer, Mark Story is a Bay lad, born and bred in one of the country’s oldest inland towns, Waipawa in Central Hawke’s Bay. After drinking my way through two universities I emerged not only with a buggered liver, but with a couple of degrees in the Arts and Business (the latter as penance for the former), a wife, mountainous student debt and the ultimate educational payoff – the realisation I knew nothing.
Five years in the windy capital and we (spawner and four spawn) returned to the salutary mores of Hawke’s Bay, where we now try our best to raise our kids on the ‘dirt raised, sun grown’ model.
Despite four years in journalism here in the Bay, it’s creative writing, poetry in particular, that’s always been my ‘thing’. If I have any mojo left in my 34 years I attribute it to the Kiwi mystic and poet, James K. Baxter – to whom I’m hopelessly reverential.
