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Carol singing, a cancelled intersection and Wayne Brown’s grand design - Simon Wilson
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Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown had a big win this week.
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
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Mayor Wayne Brown proposed to bring most of their work directly under council control and, in the end, the councillors voted unanimously for his plan.
Alongside the Government’s recently announced shakeup of Auckland Transport, this is the biggest reform of Auckland Council since its inception in 2010. And nobody knows what it’s going to mean. In fact, councillors and council officers have a range of very different ideas about what they’re doing.
Most of the debate was about the “urban regeneration” agency Eke Panuku, which will be completely abolished. Five councillors registered their opposition to that part of the plan.
From Henderson to Takapuna, Pukekohe to Panmure, Eke Panuku has 19 projects under way around the city. They include the Wynyard Quarter, where the Wynyard Crossing Bridge will finally reopen today, and where Brown’s dream of a seawater swimming pool will open on December 20.
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For many people, urban regeneration is code for “woke nonsense”: cycleways, bus priority lanes, safe streets, pedestrian-focused shopping precincts. Councillor Maurice Williamson, a former National Cabinet minister, seems to think so. He speaks regularly against those things and he saw the decision as a big win.
“I’m delighted we’re taking the first step in a long journey,” he said. “This is just the beginning.”
Labour councillor Shane Henderson didn’t see it like that at all. To him, something else was at stake.
“It’s a simple principle that public assets, public funds, should be governed to the greatest extent possible by the people elected to represent the public interest,” he said.
Not quasi-independent boards, he meant.
But Henderson is a big fan of urban regeneration and sees the new plan as a way to get more of it. If a suburb wants more trees or better footpaths, let them have it.
The officials who developed the plan are also fans of urban regeneration. Unlike Williamson and some others, they like what Eke Panuku has been trying to do.
“We’ve been very clear,” said Brown’s chief of staff, Jazz Singh, “we’re not expecting anything to change in the work programme. Nothing in the long-term plan will be cut.”
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Phil Wilson, the chief executive, called the whole exercise “lift and shift”. His message: What will change is that the good people doing the good work will come over and do it for us. That’s if they want to, of course.
But something more than that is in the wind. There’s a view that a powerful Auckland Development Office (ADO) could be established within the council administration, integrating good urban design, urban planning and economic opportunities into all urban renewal work and new developments.
It would mean this is definitely not an exercise in cutting costs and stopping all the woke stuff. They want to do it all better.
Grand designs? Yes. But how?
Simpson quoted Brown on three principles or goals for the exercise: democratic accountability, strategic alignment across the council group and efficiency. “But,” she asked, “how do we know delivery will be better? That’s what this is all about, right? It needs to be better. So how will the new structure make the delivery better?”
Council executive Max Hardy replied, “What I can say is that the mayor has articulated in his proposal some objectives ... including the ones you’ve referred to. We’re aware this has to make the delivery better.”
It was an astonishing answer. Fine words are all very well, but they don’t know how. They haven’t even worked out a new structure yet.
Councillor Lotu Fuli referred to this later: “When staff were asked point blank, ‘What evidence do you have that what’s being proposed will make it better?’ we got ums and ers and, ‘We expect so,’ ‘We think so,’ ‘Trust us.’ And that does not sit well with me.”
Councillor Chris Darby was thinking much the same. He said, “We know Eke Panuku is meeting its KPIs. It’s winning awards ... Its staff satisfaction rates exceed the core council. And they are delivering on what we ask of them. Given that, what is the problem?”
He proposed a compromise that included a delay till the end of March so the officials could work up a proper plan. This was voted down.
It’s the biggest structural change in the history of the Supercity, and it’s being done with a giant leap of faith. As I wrote on Wednesday, this seems like a terrible way to proceed.
But they’re doing it. On a fast track, with the next report due in February.
“February will be a big month for us,” said Simpson. “Come February, when the model [for the new structure] comes back, that’s when I will really have my say.”
How does Mayor Brown see it? Anti-woke shutdown, or bigger and better urban regeneration than ever?
He seems to be on board with the new ADO concept. He even said his predecessor Phil Goff had been wrong to abolish the Auckland Design Office (the old ADO), run by the long-departed Ludo Campbell-Reid. “I want the ADO to come back,” he said.
Funnily enough, that’s the kind of thing a mayor who’s fed up with anti-wokeness would say.
Quiz: How well do you know Auckland?
Can you name the codes for each of these Auckland sports clubs?
A. Bay Roskill Vikings
B. Auckland Jaguars
C. Fencibles United
D. Glenfield Greyhounds
E. Kotimana Saltires
Answers at the end.
Libraries and their books
Got a lazy summer planned but not quite sure what to read while you’re being lazy?
Auckland Libraries have the answer. Actually, they have 100 answers. They’ve chosen 100 of the best books of 2024, including fiction and non-fiction, kids’ books, graphic books for all ages, “beach reads” and book-club favourites, on topics including “climate change, protest art, gender rebellion, radical living, independent bookshops, indigenous music, van life, and biographies and memoirs of beloved New Zealanders”.
Check it out, online or wherever in the city you are, because with more than 50 branches, Auckland has the largest public library network in the southern hemisphere. And despite what you may have heard about the death of reading, books, public institutions or attention spans, Auckland’s library patronage is growing.
How to be fair to everyone, or at least try
That council meeting reached its event horizon at 3pm, when Mayor Brown proposed to go round the room giving each of the 20 councillors five minutes to speak, after which they would vote.
They argued about whether to go clockwise, anticlockwise or alphabetically. They started to go anti, only for one councillor to refuse to take his turn. The next complained that he should be allowed to do that, too. A third objected that it was all a breach of standing orders and they were entitled to join the queue to speak whenever they wanted.
Brown abandoned his plan. The meeting had started at 10am and the vote came close to 5pm.
Hill St Blues
Here’s something Transport Minister Simeon Brown may not have seen coming. In Warkworth, locals are up in arms that the minister has cancelled plans to fix the diabolical double intersection at the north end of their town.
It’s the one where the road from the town centre turns right to meet the roads to Sandspit and Matakana, and left to meet Hill St and the remnant bit of the Twin Coast Discovery Highway, which links to the new Northern Motorway extension.
In all, there are seven roads leading into that intersection. It’s always dangerous and on busy weekends it gets completely clogged. Even with the bypass now in place it has a fair claim to being the worst in the whole city.
Late last year, Auckland Transport announced that two roundabouts would be built. But as RNZ reports, Minister Brown has removed the project from the 2024-2027 funding plan.
One reason was that the new motorway and Matakana link road have reduced traffic volumes through the intersection.
But the difference is not significant. Murray Chapman from the One Mahurangi Business Association told RNZ it was as if the intersection had been designed “by somebody going through emotional turmoil”.
“Some people bully their way through,” he said. “Some people will sit at the give way signs for what seems like hours, because they’re too scared to go anywhere.”
Besides, said Dave Stott, who co-chairs the One Mahurangi Transport and Infrastructure Forum with local MP Chris Penk, three big housing developments are under way and they will push up the traffic numbers again.
The real reason it’s been cancelled? Cycleways.
Brown’s Government Policy Statement on Land Transport prevents transport planners from including cycleways in roading projects. They must now be planned, consented, funded and constructed completely separately, even when they run alongside the road and it’s obviously much cheaper and less disruptive to do all the work at the same time.
The plan for this particular intersection has three stretches of cycleway. It also has some raised-table speed humps to slow the traffic.
The cycleways are there, Stott explained, because schoolkids from the new subdivisions will have to pass through the intersection every day, and because it connects to the popular Matakana Coastal Trail, and because cycling, if it’s safe, is an obvious way for locals to get around the town.
Brown told them to “get back to basics”. He says AT will need to redesign the project and put it back in the queue for approval.
Stott, a roading engineer, said they’ve been working on this for years and locals are “appalled” and “insulted”.
“We’ve had a number of our own engineers working side by side with the engineers at Auckland Transport,” he said, “to come up with what we believe to be the most economic and most effective design for that intersection.”
Penk, presumably, has had a few things to say to Brown about this. His electorate of Kaipara ki Mahurangi, which includes Warkworth, is a National Party stronghold. But tourists and locals like riding bicycles there too, and they want their kids to be able to do the same.
Turning shares into money for sharing
Auckland Council has completed the sale of its 9.71% shareholding in Auckland International Airport for a price of $8.08 a share, which is more than the budgeted amount of $7.89 after transaction costs.
That puts $1.31 billion into the council’s new Auckland Future Fund, which will be invested “via a trust structure” in diversified assets, the interest on which will help fund council services. That’s tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year.
Art from disaster
The West Coast settlement of Muriwai was one of the worst-hit parts of Auckland during Cyclone Gabrielle in February last year. Two people died, many homes were damaged or completely destroyed and, to date, 68 have been earmarked for removal. Many people have had to leave the place they loved.
The Restore Muriwai group has commissioned sculptor Jeff Thomson, famous for his corrugated iron pieces, to work with local artists to create a permanent commemorative work in the community. Debris from those 68 properties will be used in the sculpture, along with pieces created in the aftermath of the storm, including Muriwai Love Letters, Muriwai Voices and tile mosaics created more recently. A crowd-funding campaign is under way with help from the Arts Foundation.
Auckland Zoo has a Jeff Thomson elephant. Muriwai is getting – well, who knows, but I bet it’ll be amazing.
They said it
“No amount of mechanisms will make accountability work – it takes people, and relationships between people, to achieve this.” Councillor John Watson, quoting the report of the last review into council-controlled organisations, set up by Phil Goff in 2020.
Quiz answer
Bay Roskill Vikings: Rugby league
Auckland Jaguars: Basketball
Fencibles United: Football
Glenfield Greyhounds: Rugby league
Kotimana Saltires: Netball
