Latest news with #JohnRyan
Otago Daily Times
a day ago
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
Council rejects mobile sauna's trading permit
A plan to operate a mobile sauna next to Lake Dunstan in Cromwell has hit a bureaucratic brick wall. Businessman and sauna-fanatic John Ryan has failed to get the go-ahead from the Central Otago District Council or Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (Linz) to periodically park his travelling sauna on public land beside the lake. Mr Ryan's sauna is 2.5m by 3m, can fit 15 people and sits atop a trailer pulled by his Land Rover. "One side has a big open window, so you can look out to the lake," Mr Ryan said. Several weeks ago, Mr Ryan had a trial run of the sauna at Alpha Street Reserve, offering free use of it to members of the public. "I parked up near the swimming platform there, so people could have a sauna and have a dip," he said. "Seventeen people turned up and they all loved it." However, Mr Ryan's application to the district council for a mobile trading permit for the venture has been declined. "Their excuse was they want to protect the reserve", he said. He also took his idea to Linz, which administered some of the lakeside land in Cromwell, but staff there "knocked it back". "I don't think they fully understand what it is or how it runs." District council parks and recreation manager Gordon Bailey confirmed the reserve-land status of the spots Mr Ryan wished to park at was the reason his application was declined. The land in question was governed by the council's reserve management plan — which specified what could and could not go on reserves — as well as the Reserve Act 1977, he said. The commercial rather than recreational nature of Mr Ryan's activity meant it "was not consistent" with the plan, nor the Act. Meanwhile, although Linz had no official record of a conversation with Mr Ryan, head of Crown property Sonya Wikitera told the Otago Daily Times her staff received many inquiries about the use of Crown land for commercial businesses and were always available to talk through a person's plans before any official application to Linz was made. "When providing advice or assessing formal applications, Linz considers the potential impact on the Crown land, public use, impact on other businesses already operating in the area, other applications which may have already been made, feedback from other agencies and the public, as well as impacts on existing infrastructure like toilets, rubbish bins and carparking," Ms Wikitera said. Mr Ryan's sauna is wood-clad, has a chimney out the top and is heated by a "Sweaty Meg" — a custom-built wood burner sold through his other business, Roaring Meg Fires. "They're like traditional Finnish wood-fire heaters," he said. On the trial night, Mr Ryan had hand-held lanterns ready outside the sauna for people to take to guide them down to the lake in between stints in the sauna. He reckoned a one-hour session was about right — 15 minutes in the heat, five minutes for a cool dip, then back to the sauna and repeat times two. Mr Ryan is a sauna convert. "They're amazing; good for your health. I've 'sauna-ed' every night for, oh, I don't know how long," he said. "They help fight cardiovascular disease. They're good for sleep. There's so much research been done on saunas now." Mr Ryan's case is not the only one where a mobile sauna has faced consenting challenges. The Marlborough District Council has gone back and forth on its decision to reject a proposal to allow a similar set up on reserve land beside a beach in Picton. Mr Ryan has launched a petition in an attempt to persuade the Central Otago District Council to reconsider his proposal.
National Post
2 days ago
- Automotive
- National Post
Rumours confirmed of car swallowed up by Lake Minnewanka in Alberta nearly a century ago
It took only a few minutes of diving time for John Ryan and his team to confirm a decades-long rumour of a car resting on the bottom at the middle of Lake Minnewanka. Article content Article content A week ago, the Airdrie resident and his companions donned wetsuits and fell off an inflatable boat to scour the Banff National Park's lake for a car that had supposedly fallen through the ice in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Article content Article content At a depth of nearly 60 metres about four kilometers from shore, the ghostly sight of an Essex sedan, possibly of 1928 vintage, emerged in the silty, grey-green murk. Article content Article content 'We found it in seven minutes, which is extremely rare,' said Ryan, adding the discovery was made in water with five metres of visibility. Article content 'The lake is slowly giving up its secrets and we're determined to get there.' Article content Ryan and fellow divers Alan Keller and Brian Nadwidny had been tantalized by stories of a Saskatchewan photographer who'd driven his car far out onto the lake's ice and had set up his camera tripod when his vehicle broke through the ice, fortunately without him. Article content The trio had recently received a tip from a man who had detected what could have been the lost car while searching for a body using side-scan sonar. Article content 'We obviously needed to dive for it, there was no two ways about it,' said Ryan. Article content Using their own sonar device on board their boat, the men pinpointed the most likely site for the car in one of the deepest parts of the frigid lake and swiftly found it resting on the lake's silty bottom, the first time humans have laid eyes on it since its disappearance, said Ryan. Article content 'Being the first to see this dusty old car is the reason we do it (given) all the expense and time away from home,' he said. Article content The old Detroit-built car has kept its park pass — metal in those days — and white Saskatchewan licence plates bearing the red numbers 48009. Article content A shovel partly buried in silt can be glimpsed inside the car that initially appears in sturdy condition, 'but you can see the years have not been good to it,' said Ryan. Article content The cars aren't the only sunken human artifacts hidden by the 20 km-long lake northeast of the Banff townsite. Article content The ruins of the summer village of Minnewanka Landing, which was fully inundated in 1941 with the construction of a dam. Article content It's a subterranean locale known well by scuba diver Ryan, who has floated along its streets that lie 18 metres below the lake's waves. Article content 'You can see the ruins of a hotel (dating to 1886), a stove, lanterns, a road, tree stumps and a sidewalk,' said Ryan. But those ruins are well-travelled by divers, he said. Other undiscovered prizes remain somewhere much further from shore than the remains of the village. Article content The rumour is, there might be two other cars sitting in Lake Minnewanka glacier-fed depths waiting to be discovered, said the Airdrie man. Article content
Calgary Herald
3 days ago
- Automotive
- Calgary Herald
Scuba divers confirm rumours of car swallowed up by Lake Minnewanka nearly a century ago
It took only a few minutes of diving time for John Ryan and his team to confirm a decades-long rumour of a car resting on the bottom at the middle of Lake Minnewanka. Article content Article content A week ago, the Airdrie resident and his companions donned wetsuits and fell off an inflatable boat to scour the Banff National Park's lake for a car that had supposedly fallen through the ice in the late 1920s or early 1930s. Article content Article content At a depth of nearly 60 metres about four kilometers from shore, the ghostly sight of an Essex sedan, possibly of 1928 vintage, emerged in the silty, grey-green murk. Article content Article content 'We found it in seven minutes, which is extremely rare,' said Ryan, adding the discovery was made in water with five metres of visibility. Article content 'The lake is slowly giving up its secrets and we're determined to get there.' Article content Ryan and fellow divers Alan Keller and Brian Nadwidny had been tantalized by stories of a Saskatchewan photographer who'd driven his car far out onto the lake's ice and had set up his camera tripod when his vehicle broke through the ice, fortunately without him. Article content The trio had recently received a tip from a man who had detected what could have been the lost car while searching for a body using side-scan sonar. Article content 'We obviously needed to dive for it, there was no two ways about it,' said Ryan. Article content Article content Using their own sonar device on board their boat, the men pinpointed the most likely site for the car in one of the deepest parts of the frigid lake and swiftly found it resting on the lake's silty bottom, the first time humans have laid eyes on it since its disappearance, said Ryan. Article content 'Being the first to see this dusty old car is the reason we do it (given) all the expense and time away from home,' he said. Article content The old Detroit-built car has kept its park pass — metal in those days — and white Saskatchewan licence plates bearing the red numbers 48009.
NZ Herald
18-05-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Danyl McLauchlan: Departure of two key figures illuminate what went wrong under Ardern
Two senior figures are leaving New Zealand politics within a few months of each other: long-serving Labour MP David Parker, who recently delivered his farewell speech in the House, and Auditor-General John Ryan, whose seven-year term spanning most of the Ardern-Hipkins years ends on July 1. With the current coalition
Scoop
16-05-2025
- Business
- Scoop
The House: Wake-Up Call To MPs Over Building Relationships After Treaty Settlements
Article – RNZ Public organisations are treating Treaty commitments like transactions, not relationships, the Auditor-General says. The Auditor-General issued a wake-up call to MPs this week during his briefing to Parliament's Māori Affairs Committee on how poorly public organisations are fulfilling Treaty settlements. Public organisations are treating Treaty commitments like transactions, not relationships, John Ryan told Parliament's Māori Affairs Committee. 'Fundamentally, this is the law, and we should be complying with it.' The briefing follows an investigation from the Office of the Controller and Auditor-General (an independent Parliamentary watchdog), who wanted to see 'how effective the public sector arrangements for Treaty settlement commitments are'. Appearing before the Committee on Wednesday, Controller and Auditor-General John Ryan told MPs that the report, which he viewed as one of the most important in his seven year term, found that the Crown was failing to honour its legal and contractual settlement commitments, of which there are 12,000 across approximately 80 settlements. 'This is a legal compliance issue. If you just take everything else away from it, fundamentally, this is the law, and we should be complying with it as public agencies. The Auditor-General is normally a cold hearted accountant, but when I read this, I felt like we needed to act on this,' Ryan told Māori Affairs Committee MPs. The report found that most of the 150 responsible public organisations treated settlements as one-off transactions, and failed to recognise that, at their core, settlements are about resetting relationships. Relationships which should be durable and ongoing. 'The Crown, I think, has seen it like this after the treaty settlement process – as a series of transactions that needed to be managed rather than a relationship that needed to be reset.' Ryan and his team suggested that public organisations are often inclined to, at worst, just ignore commitments, and at best, treat them with a bureaucratic tick-box KPI mentality. The Treaty Settlement process has been a defining facet of Māori-Crown relations for decades. Since the first settlements in the 1990s, $2.738 billion of financial and commercial redress has been given by the Crown to Post-Settlement Governance Entities (PSGEs), the term for claimant groups, usually represented by a particular iwi. In a moment of reflection following Ryan's presentation, committee chair National MP David MacLeod suggested that a lack of personal connection could potentially be part of the problem. 'We have people that represent the Crown in negotiations, on a daily basis for a long time, they almost become emotionally tied to what the settlement is all about,' MacLeod said. 'Then post settlement, that group of people move on to the next one, and then there's a whole fresh one that actually doesn't have any of that history [and] the relationship that's being formed in that.' The Auditor-General said MacLeod's observation was probably a fair one. 'I think that's an interesting observation because I think what the public sector does once the settlement been reached, is it looks like a series of tasks to deliver rather than the bigger intent that's behind it, because as you say, there's people that go through the settlement process, I hate using the phrase, but on a journey to get to the point of settlement, legislation, deed of settlement. Then the public sector picks that up in various agencies rather than takes that intent that was formed here, and puts it in place over here.' Armed with insight from the Auditor-General's report and briefing, Māori Affairs Committee MPs may perhaps think differently (and encourage their colleagues to do the same) the next time a settlement comes through Parliament. They didn't need to wait long. The first reading of the Ngāti Hāua Claims Settlement Bill, and all stages of the Ngā Hapū o Ranginui Claims Settlement Bill were also occurring at Parliament this week. What are briefings? This meeting of the Māori Affairs Committee and Auditor-General was a briefing. Briefings are a less formal version of the inquiry function that committees can initiate. In some cases, once members have learned more about an issue through briefings they may launch an inquiry to dig deeper. There's no requirement though. Briefings give committees the chance to get the low-down of an issue from subject matter experts. This can be members of the public, a visiting overseas delegation, or as in this case, an Officer of Parliament – the Controller and Auditor-General.
