Tauranga Chamber of Commerce today appealed to Tauranga City Council to adopt a new vision statement to provide a new sense of purpose and direction.

CEO Max Mason told council at today's Annual Plan hearings Tauranga needs to adopt a new culture and aspire to be ‘New Zealand's best city'.

Tauranga Chamber of Commerce CEO Max Mason says the city needs a new vision.

He compared Auckland's five word vision statement of ‘The world's most liveable city,' with Tauranga's 67 words, which ‘was designed by a committee and is bland and boring'.

He said Tauranga had been through a long period of hard infrastructure development, and now that was largely in place the city needed to change into a new paradigm of soft infrastructure development, and an inspiring city vision would help achieve it.

'First and foremost we need to grow our local economy to create good jobs and grow our quality of life.

'Unfortunately we have a thin economy, over dependent on a few big industries, with low wages, that is vulnerable to external economic events.

Max says the city needs to attract businesses and people who can create wealth.

'However they don't just come here for business opportunities, they are equally attracted by good educational provision, arts and cultural institutions, international quality events and sporting facilities, and an attractive urban environment with public art and great architecture.

'Add to that a strong sense of community vision and identity and it's a winning combination,” says Max.

He said if Tauranga had an aspirational city vision such as ‘New Zealand's best city,' council staff and elected members would make better decisions looking through that lens.

'Take a planner who is processing a pile of resource consents. If they had a mindset of us being the best city by having full employment, and one resource consent is likely to create more jobs than the others then they should be encouraged to deal with that one first.”

'If you apply this attitude throughout the council organisation there will be a culture change which will have far reaching results throughout our community,” he said.

Max referred to the book ‘What got you here, won't get you there,' and said the city's past focus on infrastructure development and short term cost control now needed to evolve into a longer term investment perspective in economic and community development.

'This is less about money and more about leadership,” he said,

'And with a new CEO in Garry Poole, and new senior managers, the timing was perfect for culture change.”