Campaigners call for marine reserve extension

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Conservationists want an Auckland marine reserve extended to compensate for the widening of a causeway carrying the Northwestern Motorway between Waterview and Te Atatu.

A proposal to raise the causeway by 1.5m to cope with rising tides, and to widen it from about 60m to 75m, is among a number of applications the Transport Agency has lodged for $1.75 billion of western ring route road construction including the Waterview motorway connection.

Although the partly tunnelled Waterview section is the main focus of controversy among community groups dismayed at a tight deadline of October 15 for preparing submissions for the country's largest motorway project, the Forest and Bird Society is concerned that the causeway-widening proposal has been lumped into the exercise as well.

"This is a horrible shock, really, because it means we have to make a submission much earlier than I had anticipated," Auckland branch president Anne Fenn said in a memo to fellow society officials.

Ms Fenn accused the Transport Agency of "confusing everyone by calling it the Waterview Connection" instead of treating the Northwestern Motorway as a separate project because of its marine conservation implications.

Agency highways manager Tommy Parker said his organisation was prepared to keep meeting the society to consider its concerns, but had joined the causeway works to the Waterview motorway project so a Government-appointed board of inquiry could consider all the associated issues in a holistic way.