In April, councillors requested officials test the market for interest in refurbishing to today's standards.
This week they were told private-sector developers considered a residential conversion the most viable option with a preference for freehold tenure. A hotel conversion was a possibility but office use had limited appeal.
Refurbishment to modern office and code requirements was put at $78 million, a residential conversion at $60 million.
To demolish and reinstate the site: $11.5 million to $12.5 million.
What council staff couldn't say was what sort of profit, or loss, was likely if the council put the property on the market for refitting. Council property chief David Rankin did concede that whichever option was taken, recovering the full cost of refurbishment was improbable. Councillors will surely need such a figure when it comes up for further consideration next February.
What is encouraging is that Regional Facilities Auckland (RFA), the operator of the Civic/Aotea Centre precinct, sees a refurbished tower next door as a potential part of its scheduled -- and, it emphasises, fully funded within the long-term plan -- large-scale renewal programme for the Aotea Centre. This includes making the 25-year-old entertainment complex weathertight and renovating the well-worn foyer spaces.
The $30 million project would reactivate plans for Stage 2 of the Aotea Centre projects, which envisaged new studio and rehearsal spaces for the city's major performing arts groups. They see a restored glass tower as providing office accommodation for both the performing arts groups, and also themselves. Currently RFA is housed in the main building.
Their aim is to make an enhanced Aotea Centre a home for arts and cultural groups, activating the area as the hub of the entertainment and arts district.
Within the heritage and architecture community, there's a consensus that this pioneering example of a modernist office block should be preserved.
Heritage New Zealand has until now failed, like the council's heritage division, to list it as worthy of protection, but both public guardians of our past are now fighting for its protection.
As I've commented in the past, perhaps they'd assumed that as a publicly owned building, its preservation was already a given.
That as the council is the body responsible for identifying privately owned heritage buildings and cajoling their owners into protecting them, it would be, to say the least, counter-productive for it to destroy a heritage icon of its own.
After all, Auckland Council should be setting the standard it expects private owners to observe.
Councillor Chris Darby points to what he calls the uncanny example of Perth's Council House, built about the same time and in the same style, with the same asbestos-coated steel-framing, which was saved from demolition in the mid-1990s after a long battle by heritage campaigners. It now continues in council use. It seems a good example to follow.
Council staff will empty out of the Auckland building by year's end, into the flash, newly renovated former ASB HQ around the corner. We're told "the council has no identified operational or service requirements for the building" after that time.
That seems to forget there are hundreds of council employees scattered around the city in expensive rental accommodation.
We're paying $820,800 a year rental, for example, for AMP Tower space for Auckland Transport and City Rail Link tunnel project advisers.
The Maori Statutory Board is in plush offices in Viaduct Harbour. Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development occupies two floors of the old harbour board offices on Princes Wharf.
Think of the rent saved if they were to come "home".
