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Auckland City is leading the country in radical new contracting arrangements for tens of million of dollars of annual road maintenance work.
The council has agreed to form a contracting "alliance" with a consortium of three firms to look after roads throughout one-third of the city, covering all its territory west of Grafton Gully and Dominion Rd.
It has chosen Australian-owned Leighton Contractors in association with Blacktop Construction and MWH ahead of three other groups which lodged tenders for the work. As equal partners, the council and its contractors are to share any profits from meeting enhanced programme targets, or any losses if they fail to reach these.
Council transport infrastructure delivery group manager Tim Lott said although there would be no reduction in road maintenance and renewal budgets, which amount to about $150 million a year over the whole city, the new arrangements would allow faster improvements to its valuable assets.
"Ratepayers will be getting more bang for their buck," he promised.
Instead of operating in a traditional "master-servant" relationship, the partners would collaborate on the best way of providing "whole-of-life" care to the roading network.
That would include careful assessments of traffic loads to ensure the most appropriate rather than least costly materials were used.
The partners will spend the next three months deciding on a work programme for the first year of a possible five-year contract. Because the maintenance of footpaths has been excluded for the first year, the initial roading budget will be about $32 million compared with typical annual expenditure of around $45 million after that.
