Government will look at $11 m prisons landscaping bill

The $11 million cost of landscaping four new prisons will be examined by the Government in an already existing review of new prison cost blowouts, Prime Minister Helen Clark says.

The $11 million figure has come under fire from the National Party, which says it is exorbitant.

Miss Clark today said the prison sites required extensive landscaping so they were not an eyesore for the local communities in which they existed.

"If you just built an industrial eyesore there you would run into a lot of opposition, so they have to be properly landscaped, there's not question about that," Miss Clark said on Newstalk ZB.

She did not know whether the $11 million was a reasonable figure for landscaping the combined 639ha of the four prison sites, but it would be looked at in an existing review of the cost of the four prisons.

Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor is overseeing the review, which was instigated earlier this year after revelations of substantial blowouts in the construction budgets of the four prisons.

Figures released by Mr O'Connor in answer to a parliamentary question showed the estimated prison landscaping costs were: Spring Hill (Waikato) $4.34 million, Ngawha (Northland) $1.56 million, Auckland Women's $1.98 million, and Otago Region $3.3 million.

Corrections Department project and development manager John Hamilton said today the department was required under the Resource Management Act to mitigate the effect of prisons on their local environments. That required substantial "screen planting".

"We also need to get ground cover on all of the areas and we are talking in excess of 600ha in total," he said on National Radio.

Its landscaping plan was part of its resource consent.

Landscaping took in concrete strips around all the buildings, pathways, courtyards, lawns, planting and any measures required to stop dust or dirt run-off.

National law and order spokesman Simon Power yesterday said he realised some of the sites had to meet visual stipulations under resource consent agreements to satisfy the local community.

"But that is a lot of plants, design work, planting, topsoil, pavement and bark."

Mr Power said he believed there was no way the cost could be so high without "some very serious rorting going on somewhere in the system".

- NZPA