George Farrant: Speak up if you want it preserved

Got the authority of a Pope, an elephant's hide, the patience of Job, Solomon's wisdom, a St Bernard's stamina, and a trick cyclist's sense of balance? Great, then you are needed, after local body elections in which heritage was a significant concern to a wide range of successful mayoral, council, and community board candidates.

The pressure is on to resource heritage appropriately, to sharpen approaches, and to hear the community. Time, too, to address some of the basic questions often asked.

Such as, why are councils involved anyway? By law they are responsible as heritage protection authorities to identify, protect, and monitor "heritage" - worthy buildings, objects, places, archaeology, geology, ecology, trees, landforms, landscapes, Maori heritage sites, views, and whatever other aspects of the environment we'd like to leave intact for our descendants to appreciate.

Isn't this exactly what the Historic Places Trust does when they register a site? Bill Tramposch, the trust chief executive, in 2002, said after a kerfuffle about some waahi tapu sites: "Does registration ... of any historic place or area, give the trust the power to control what happens on an individual's private property? No, it does not. The rules concerning what landowners can do with their property are set out in the relevant council's district plan. The power to set rules and make decisions affecting what landowners do with their properties is solely that of the council, not of the Historic Places Trust."

Fine, but didn't Auckland City allow His Majesty's Theatre and the Salvation Army Citadel to be demolished, and most of its heritage to be lost in the 1980s?

Well, yes to the first, and no to the second. There were heritage losses, such as the theatre in 1988, and the citadel in 1990, but these were more than 14 years ago, not yesterday, and took place before the Auckland City Council appointed dedicated heritage staff to identify and protect worthy items.

The demolition of these two buildings spurred a determined turnaround, and, as a consequence, there have been no losses since of any building in the city's district plan schedules. At present Auckland City protects nearly 3800 places, all significant, and many of them absolute gems.

So is the council collecting suggestions for new scheduling in secret, without telling owners? Auckland City has, indeed, responded to public concerns by allocating $100,000 for heritage research, has asked for public input; and, no, it is not making the initial list of suggestions public.

That is because the only thing that counts is whether a council eventually notifies its actual intent to schedule - not the mere fact that somebody, anybody, has suggested it.

In practice, only a small proportion of the many hundreds of bona fide suggestions made will become protected. Nominations with well-documented facts have a fighting chance; those with little information go into the queue for access to limited research resources; while some of them - all those with zero information - go to the bottom.

Some critics have suggested the scoring system is open to individual bias. This would be true if the assessor didn't understand the strict rules for scoring, or was not carefully dispassionate about the item being assessed.

This effect is seen often when an external party emphatically promoting (or opposing) a scheduling does their own assessment using the council's scoring system.

Auckland City's approach is, instead, to score conservatively and robustly. Points are ascribed only to verifiable facts, and not to assertion or likelihood.

Why doesn't the council just protect everything that is old, beautiful, or that the community wants preserved?

One, because not all significant heritage is lovely (think of the old Bluestone Store in Durham Lane), and not all heritage is old (think West Plaza building). Two, because to protect places that are just liked would be to rely on emotive rather than robust, court-defendable evaluations.

Auckland City's methodical, transparent ranking system publishes a detailed heritage value at the outset, when an intended protection action is notified by the council to the public. It is open to all, and if an assessment survives challenges it is difficult to unseat later.

Then why were places such as the Fitzroy Hotel in Airedale St, and the Paykel house in St Stephens Ave not on the district plan schedule?

While there is no excuse for missing obvious architectural merit, sometimes less visible but important associations and histories are simply not widely known, and research is expensive. In other words, things can be missed.

In some cases, items have been assessed previously on the basis of known facts, but these were just not enough to score above the necessary threshold.

This is precisely why community knowledge is crucial. Locally known associations and events can make all the difference between protection or not.

Anyone who knows a historic fact or two about a contender place should speak up when the opportunity presents itself. Otherwise don't carp that there is no protection in place when it's too late.

But if a scheduled place is protected, why can't the council also just stop any development that threatens an unscheduled historic place?

It can, but the consequences are daunting if a development complies with the district plan. Then a council would face paying hefty compensation for aborted costs, and for purchase.

Is it true that owners face the burden of heritage preservation alone? No, since most responsible councils, Auckland City included, recognise the need to provide free professional advice, remission of fees for consents required because of scheduling or conservation zoning, and, in some circumstances, the right to transfer lost development opportunities to another site or owner.

Other financial mechanisms are being investigated. Auckland City has recently allocated an initial fund of $50,000 to help building owners, after a similar ecological site fund in the city proved very popular and effective - not a huge amount, but a start.

These contributions are quite separate to Auckland City's $100 million expenditure restoring its own Town Hall, Civic Theatre, the old CPO, and a huge contribution to the Britomart above-ground heritage buildings.

So what is the ideal answer? The difficult task assigned to local councils by the Resource Management Act is to try to strike a balance between those who want everything protected and those who want it all left purely to the goodwill of owners.

The real goal is to leave an adequate representative sample of our natural and creative legacy from all periods in our past. * George Farrant is the heritage manager for Auckland City.