KEY POINTS:
The ground at Volcanic Park at Stonefields is as hard as rock because of the warm weather and dry autumn winds.
New terrace and standalone homes surround the park. Several families have moved in, and Christmas decorations are out at an open home in Singleton Ave.
Residents should be looking out to a fountain, shade trees and stone paths on the gently sloping park. Instead, it's bare grass and hard, cracking soil.
One resident, who wanted to be identified only as Rebecca, moved into a four-bedroom brick terrace house with her two teenage daughters last week. She has received mixed messages about work starting on Volcanic Park. Initially it was before Christmas, now it was February, she said.
The new suburb caught her eye while she was taking her daughters to the nearby Auckland Netball Centre. She liked the masterplan concept and looking out her front window to a park with trees and birds.
It would have been good to have some plants in before summer, she said, but it was better than a pile of earth and gave children somewhere to kick around a ball.
Stonefields, on the old Mt Wellington quarry, is being marketed as a master-planned community in which every home is within a five-minute walk of one of eight neighbourhood parks.
The 110ha site is the largest piece of undeveloped land on the isthmus in Auckland City and will eventually have 2900 homes for 6500 residents. A new primary school is to open in 2011 and there will be a shopping village, lake and wetland.
But as people move into the "new community", the Auckland City Council has been lagging on the park front. On Wednesday, the council accepted the advice of officers to defer a $7 million park network by three years as part of hundreds of millions of dollars of trims the new 10-year budget.
The deferral has alarmed City Vision councillors like Leila Boyle, who say Stonefields was key to demonstrating how the council dealt with intensification.
"I don't think it is right to have people moving in with no infrastructure supporting them, including parks," she said.
A senior recreation manager, Ruth Stokes, yesterday sought to allay fears the council was dragging its feet by saying work on the first two parks could begin in January and be completed in six weeks. A masterplan for all the reserves was in the final throes.
She said the developer, Landco, would complete the two parks on behalf of the council, subject to final design and consenting issues. Landco has paid development contributions to the council to provide parks.
"I don't believe there was ever an expectation that all the parks would be finished by the time all the houses were complete," Ruth Stokes said.
Landco managing director Evan Davies said everyone, including Landco, council and Fletcher Residential, which is building homes at Stonefields, would have preferred the first two parks to be completed by now.
He said it was a surprise to hear the council was delaying further parks.
