‘Four more years of stench’ makes an attention-grabbing headline but it’s misleading in terms of the messages delivered at this week’s public meeting on the Seaview sewage treatment plant.

It wrongly gives the impression we’re stuck with the current level of stink for the foreseeable future.  In fact, there are grounds for optimism that odour improvements might only be a month or two away as moves to get complicated systems that govern what is a live biological process back into balance.

Are the ways we’ve done things in the past, and the facilities we maintain, fit for purpose and cost-effective going forward?

That’s a question Hutt City Council is asking itself on a number of fronts in an effort to keep a lid on rates rises.