Te Puna Station Road pictured in the days after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Western Bay of Plenty Council
Te Puna Station Road pictured in the days after Cyclone Gabrielle. Photo / Western Bay of Plenty Council
Western Bay of Plenty District Council is waiting to hear if it will get a slice of $941 million in Government funding as it faces a more than $20 million repair bill for storm-damaged roads.
The Project and Monitoring Committee meeting received an update on storm damage on Tuesday.
A report presented to the meeting said its 10-year average annual cost for storm response activities was $605,000. This financial year, however, four extreme weather events had inflated costs, with replacing bridges and re-opening roads significant contributors. The total was expected to exceed $20m.
Usually, the costs would fall on the council and Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency, with the council paying 51 per cent by default, rising to 71 per cent when annual costs rose above 10 per cent of the roading programme, the report said.
The Government had promised to help fund “initial emergency works response activity” at 91 per cent up to June 2023 due to the cyclone’s impact on local roads in the upper North Island.
Deputy chief executive Gary Allis said the council was expecting a letter this week to clarify whether it was in line for any of the $941m the Government announced on Sunday to help cyclone and flood-hit communities in the North Island recover and futureproof.
A breakdown of the district’s costs showed some of the most expensive clean-up works include replacing Bridge 83 on No. 4 Rd at $8m, plus $1.2m for a Bailey bridge in the interim; $1m for an underslip on Te Puke Quarry Rd; and $1m for an underslip on No. 3 Rd. The full breakdown totalled $19.07m.
Allis told the meeting the council intended to keep Te Puna Station Rd closed to motorists, or potentially open to one lane, because it would be too “difficult and expensive” to re-open both lanes. The cost to do this would be about $4m “and we would be struggling to justify that”, Allis said. There would be community consultation before any decision was made, he said.
Council transportation manager Jim Paterson said that in terms of storm damage, it was a ”very unusual year”.
“You can see the scale of the [storm] costs, and we are not at the end of the year yet. It just shows the pressure that has been put on the network and our contractors.”
“We are now seeing, with climate change, more instances of higher rainfall events in our urban parts of the district. Our stormwater designs are designed to accommodate a 10-year event. So if we get a 12-year event, or 20-year event, water does not all go into the system. It goes overland.
“We have had underslips and washouts where the culverts hadn’t had the capacity to take it. There’s an argument that all of our culverts theoretically could be undersized.”
Paterson said the council had managed to get virtually all storm-affected roads re-opened except Te Puna Station Rd.
Western Bay storm event sites. Purple represents underslips, blue represents overslips, and orange represents bridges.
Councillor Tracy Coxhead said that while the $9.8m spend - existing and proposed - on replacing the No. 4 Rd bridge was “incredibly important”, it did not seem to line up with the council’s stance on Te Puna Station Rd.
Coxhead said that since the road was closed, there was significant Tauranga-bound traffic congestion backing up as far as Pahoia Rd on State Highway 2.
Allis responded that the council’s priorities were fixing and re-opening other roads in the network, such as Wairoa Rd and Lund Rd, where people could become cut off in another weather event. Te Puna residents still had an alternative route aside from Te Puna Station Rd, he said.
Paterson said the council was working to reduce costs. Temporarily closing Rocky Cutting Rd to allow for the clean-up of two slips had saved $80,000, compared to addressing each slip separately with traffic reduced down to one lane.
Councillor Anne Henry asked Paterson if he had funding avenues “other than your own budget”.
Paterson responded: “No, we have our ... budget, but if we consume that, we are not using it on other projects we’re planning.”
Paterson said Waka Kotahi was also offering funding to help replace roading infrastructure, but this was under an agreement replacements would be like-for-like, not necessarily improvements.
There were still discussions to be had about this, Paterson said.
The report, titled Storm Damage Across the District Update, was accepted by the committee.
