Kathe Davey-Emms

I AM very grateful for the media coverage in regard to my recent presentation to Whakatāne District Council on the dangers of the Thornton Road-East Bank Road intersection.

Thank you to the Beacon’s journalist Diane McCarthy and to photographer Troy Baker – it was a great article and a flattering photo. Thank you to Paora Manuel from Radio 1XX for airing snippets from our off air interview every half an hour over the couple of days prior to my meeting with the council.

I thought, how cool that the newspaper and radio station tracked me down and helped publicly acknowledge our concerns for our unsafe intersection.

Thank you to Shelley Bremner and Kirsten Mews at Thornton School, who helped with typesetting my survey and putting it online for their Thornton school families to complete, and for printing it out for me to give to residents down our road, making my job so much simpler.

Thanks also need to go to our council.  I did not feel nervous, I really felt heard, it all comes down to funding - like we all knew it would. I am happy that our concerns for the intersection have been presented and discussed and now the council’s job is to address this issue.

Lastly, thanks so very much to everyone who welcomed me into their homes and properties, openly sharing their concerns. I really enjoyed meeting all the new Thornton families and catching up with old friends – we have such a lovely community, it was a very worthwhile project.

I am looking forward to hearing back from the council. I am especially interested to find out where we should wait in traffic on the busy Thornton Road when we are turning into East Bank Road.

Is it in the middle of the road? Or on the shoulder to the left-hand side?

No one could tell me – does anyone one know?