KEY POINTS:
Auckland mayor John Banks has effectively killed any prospect of the proposed $10 million to $12 million upgrade of tourist facilities on Mt Eden during his term of office - so why are the bureaucrats persevering with their latest round of public consultation? Do we really need another unactioned document to add to the existing library of unrealised wish lists for this visitor magnet.
I sympathise with the mayor's lack of enthusiasm for a $7 million to $9 million ratepayer-funded visitors centre and the $3.17 million rubber-wheeled train service.
But I don't go along with his "if it ain't broke, don't try and fix it" justification. It's not that Maungawhau-Mt Eden doesn't face problems. It's just that dealing with them on an ad hoc basis is not the answer. They need to be approached as part of a management plan embracing all 50 or so of the region's unique field of volcanic cones.
If the aim of having the field adopted as a Unesco World Heritage Site is ever to be realised, then we must stop treating the mountains as individual curiosities, and start thinking regionally.
Hopefully submissions to the Royal Commission on Auckland governance will broach the topic. Proposing, perhaps, that the cones be better managed and preserved as a volcanic park, within the park structure of the Auckland Regional Council, or its successor organisation.
A recent visit to the Pukekiwiriki Crater on the edge of the Tamaki River, adjacent to the new Highbrook Business Park, East Tamaki, illustrates just how hit and miss the treatment of our geological heritage is.
Next to the new bleak factory park, a leisure park rises up from the mangroved shores of this tidal crater.
According to the developers, at 50,000 to 100,000 years old, it's one of the oldest cones.
Looking down, it is rather spectacular, even given the ugly power cables from the ugly crater-side Otahuhu electricity plant which cut the sight lines south.
Ruining it all though, is the incongruous and discordant cordon of Norfolk Pines - three deep - planted along the tuff ring that marks the break between business and pleasure parks.
The website for Highbrook Park trumpets the "stunning coastal views of some of the features that define Auckland, One Tree Hill, Rangitoto, the Sky Tower". What a joke. These views will soon be blocked out by the alien pines.
And just to make certain the view will be blocked, an unnatural hedge of close planted totara form an outer palisade.
It's a travesty of landscaping and of conservation. Thanks Manukau City for permitting this abomination to slip through.
Last week it was our biggest volcano, Rangitoto, to suffer. A minor celebrity and some business mates boated out to the protected jewel, drove up to the summit with many drums of combustibles and blew them up. All as a stunt to promote a new business. Aided and abetted, it seems, by state television. The boyos are still bragging about their potentially devastating stupidity, on their website, with film of the exploits. There's a total fire ban at all times on Rangitoto, a fragile ecosystem with the largest pohutukawa forest in the world. So far, all the Department of Conservation has done is growl, without any sign of salutary legal action. Worse, the public reaction seems to be that it was a merry prank.
What price a world heritage ranking if we treat such outrages so casually?
As for Mt Eden, the more rational - and economic - approach would be to direct those visitors interested in more than the view, to the excellent Cornwall Park information centre in the shadow of One Tree Hill. It comes complete with DVD guides to Maori occupation and geological history of the area, and more detailed knowledge available in visitor-friendly computers. Atop yet another volcano is the Auckland Museum with it's special volcano displays. Why reinvent the wheel at ratepayers' expense.
Absorbing the cones into a unified ARC-based volcanic park service would introduce the expertise of the in-house ranger service which has served Auckland's regional park system so well. No more outsourcing to the lowest tendering lawn-mowing service. It would also introduce the idea of licensing commercial activity. The regional parks service charges film crews using the West Coast beaches. Why shouldn't bus operators pay to go up Mt Eden as well.
