Look out your window. If you can see a river and you live in the Eastern Bay, you know the deal. We love them. They're part of us. But we know, when there's a downpour, they can rip us apart. And it's not a matter of if. It's when.

Cyclone Debbie was supposed to be a 100-year storm. That was 2017. And it was the flip of a coin that Gabrielle landed on the other side of the Raukūmara ranges.

By my count we've had three or four of them in the past 10 years, which means either the Eastern Bay is about 400 years old, or someone's maths is off.

I chaired the regional council's Eastern Bay river scheme committees for three of the six years I served there. That's the nuts and bolts of protecting our towns: four of the region's five schemes, most of its 400 kilometres of stopbanks, the pumps, the floodgates, the dredging, the maintenance schedules, and balancing the books for the vast majority of the $400 million in assets sitting on our balance sheet.

We paid for most of it ourselves, through targeted rates on our own properties. That protection wasn't a gift from anyone. It's ours. We built it and we're still paying it off.

And we need to make sure the institutional knowledge of these schemes isn't left in the shed when the deck gets rearranged.

Pragmatic people understand this. When he heard I was standing, Scotty McLeod came to find me at work to shake my hand and tell me I had his vote. Why? Because he sat at the table with me, alongside many other Plains people, when we were doing the work of governing the schemes. He reckoned I was pretty good at the job. A practical bloke, Scotty also knows there's too much at risk in this reshuffle to leave it to someone with no experience in regional council business.

Let's be clear: regional councils are dead meat. And with their slaughter, amalgamation is coming whether we like it or not. Who knows if it'll be an Eastern Bay or a Bay of Plenty unitary. My stance? We can do it ourselves. But there's no telling with this lot in Wellington. Blue, red or purple. Either way, when the next storm hits, and it will, who guarantees the money we earned and saved, and the machinery we paid for, will still be here, ready to go, to protect our homes and clean up the mess? Because so far, the answer's been a discussion document, and you can't sandbag your house with discussion documents.

And then there's the region's cash cow, Quayside. It might be called the Port of Tauranga, but make no mistake, it's our port too, and we need to fight for our share.

Close to three billion dollars, built up from the port over nearly 40 years. It pays out $48 million a year, which takes about $400 off every household's rates, yours included.

There are people sniffing around right now who see a restructure as a chance to get their hands on our assets. We used to talk about this in the council smoko room: the cow was getting too fat, and at risk of being rustled. And when the rustlers come, they won't be wearing camo polar fleece. They'll be wearing lanyards. So, if nobody stands up for the Eastern Bay, we won't just lose a council in this shake-up.

We could well lose the savings too, and your rates bill will show it.

I'm not going to let that happen without a scrap.

That's why I'm standing in this by-election. Not because I love meetings. Nobody loves meetings. I've survived six years of them and I can confirm. But because the Eastern Bay needs someone at that table who has the experience, and who isn't afraid of a scrap when our towns and our money are on the line. The work of protecting our homes doesn't stop while the politicians redraw the maps.

Someone has to make sure the Eastern Bay comes out of this with its defences funded, its work plan prioritised, and our share of what we built.

Your voting papers arrive in late August. Fill them in. Then go take another look out that window.