KEY POINTS:
The cynics who believe it's the bureaucrats who run Auckland, not the politicians, will find fresh ammunition with the release of the independent commissioners' report setting the parameters for the redevelopment of the waterfront Tank Farm.
In October last year, hot on the comeback trail, mayoral hopeful John Banks slammed the bulk and size of the Wynyard Quarter redevelopment envelope proposed by the bureaucrats as "a lemon". He was particularly hot on plans to allow five tower blocks of up to 14 storeys.
"I'm not going to be told by the rich and powerful developers that they can have 14-storey buildings on the Tank Farm. I'm proposing five storeys, max," he told an election meeting arranged by residents of the adjacent suburb of St Marys Bay. Soon after, he was swept back into office.
But a year on, the bureaucrats have won, with the commissioners rubber-stamping the key aspects of their draft proposals. The commissioners said they "support the maximum height limits as notified" and believed "the maximum height limits will provide an appropriate scale in relation to the street network and the prominent waterfront location..."
I write this before the report went before last night's Auckland City Council meeting, but having turned the decision-making over to independent commissioners, there's legally little councillors can do at this late stage to reject their recommendations.
In introducing their report, the commissioners declare "the redevelopment of Wynyard Quarter is an exciting opportunity, not only for the Auckland CBD and its waterfront but also for the wider region", which
is a sentiment we can all embrace. The question is, does the current scheme produce the goods?
Even the commissioners seem to be have difficulty keeping their excitement - and vision - levels up. They say the redevelopment "presents a significant opportunity to reinforce Auckland's reputation and aspirations as the City of Sails". Didn't anyone tell them that "City of Sails" was last century's vision? The aspiration now is to be nothing less than "world class".
The problem is defining what is world class. The grey bureaucrats responsible for the present proposals would have us believe they have the answers. In submitting them to the commissioners, lawyer Derek Nolan said: "As a city, we have not realised the true potential of much of Auckland's city before. Too much of the built form of what is supposed to be a world-class city [is] in fact, just plain average." He pleaded with the commissioners not to allow the proposal to be "whittled away".
When Mr Nolan said this in June, I couldn't help thinking he was asking us to have faith in the very bureaucrats - and their predecessors - who had been responsible for presiding over the building of our existing "plain average" cityscape. Why should we trust them to get it right this time?
You only have to look at the blighted Hobson St apartment nightmare, or the various planning abominations along the eastern side of the waterfront, to see the need for outside expertise.
But that would have required the political will to stand up to the officials. Even tougher, it would have required politicians to step outside their little empires and create an independent development authority dedicated solely to the task of creating a first-class waterfront.
As it stands, it's a monument to compromise in all sorts of ways. One of the alarming revelations during the hearings was a traffic planning report proposing 30 buses an hour through the area during peak hours. Some would be local buses, others bypassing over-clogged Fanshawe St on the way to the North Shore and Ponsonby.
The commissioners have ruled that it "would be inappropriate for Wynyard Quarter to be used as any type of regional road transport route" and said the proposed route should be labelled "local".
However the accompanying map shows this "local" route exiting on to Fanshawe St, which begs the question, how far beyond the Tank Farm qualifies as "local"?
With buses rumbling back and forth, whether local or not, along corridors of 32m-high buildings - broken in places by five 52m high-rises, what's being offered is not so much world class as more of the same, Auckland-style.
The good news is that with a property development downturn sweeping the globe, there might be time for a future generation to do better.
