Brian Rudman: El cheapo city council must go to end of cycleway

Brian Rudman. Photo / Kenny Rodger.

Auckland City Council and the central government road builders were happy enough to hack into the side of Mt Roskill to accommodate a motorway and cycleway.

The least they can do now is to clean up the mess properly.

It's alarming that the city's transport chairman, Ken Baguley, is attracted to a proposal to postpone the landscaping of the slopes around the proposed cycleway until some nebulous date in the future.

He needs to snap out of this penny-pinching mode. Having been party to the rape of the volcano, Auckland City has a responsibility to honour both the spirit and the letter of the rehabilitation agreements it has been arm-twisted into signing.

The el cheapo compromise is being proposed by the Mt Roskill Community Board which seems happy to live with the scars the cycleway will introduce, as long as it can be sure the mountain link in the cross-city cycleway is completed.

Board chairman Richard Barter is rightly concerned that if the project is delayed because of council belt-tightening, the city will eventually come up with a cheaper plan, another resource consent will have to be sought, and considerable amounts of time and money will be wasted.

His solution, which Mr Baguley likes, is to build the existing project, which gained a resource consent with a five-year time limit last October, in stages. The first stage would be the bare concrete path. The fear is that once the path is built, that will be the end. Particularly so, when the new Auckland Council comes into being and all the old councils are swept away, with anyone who might feel any obligation to complete the other stages.

Mr Baguley has seized the community board's intervention as an opportunity to nitpick away at other aspects of the overall plan, talking about excesses in this $1.6 million "makeover" of the volcanic slope.

But we're not talking makeover here, we're talking restitution of a valuable heritage site. He doesn't seem to appreciate that putting aside any moral or aesthetic obligations to repair the cone, Auckland City has a legal obligation under the famous 1915 act designed to protect Auckland's volcanoes from just such insults.

Alarmingly, Mr Baguley says he is worried that even just by proceeding with the cycle path "we'll be sending a signal that we agree with the specifications for the total project".

But he should be agreeing with the specifications. They arise from work commissioned by the council from landscape architect Richard Reid in 2006 and adapted to meet the approval of 38 stakeholders, including Auckland City's urban design panel.

Last November, the council's transport committee approved expenditure of $1,456,224 with a contingency of $225,000. Council acting transport strategy manager Brian Tomlinson is now talking of a $2 million estimate, but has failed to produce a breakdown of where any cost explosion has occurred.

In 2003, the Volcanic Cones Society unearthed the long-lost 1915 act which stopped the government road-builders bulldozing through the north face of the cone.

Lengthy consultations between Transit New Zealand and the cones society produced a more acceptable route, skirting the base of the cone, and recreating natural-like contours where invasive cuts were made.

Seemingly oblivious to all this, in mid-2005, the city council came up with plans for a cycleway along the side of the mountain which showed no regard for Transit's more sympathetic plans.

Uproar followed, and a much chastened council decided to retain Mr Reid, the brains behind the revised Transit plans. It is his proposals which gained the resource consent for the council last November and which Mr Baguley is now questioning.

As cones spokesman Greg Smith wryly commented: "It's got elements of a First World War battle where we've gone backwards and forwards over the same few hundred yards and we don't seem to be any further ahead."

What the council seems to ignore is that it is not discussing some backwater corner of a remote sports ground or an out of sight former rubbish dump.

The land in question is the very public face of a section of motorway costing $201 million. As far as the road builders are concerned, it's supposed to show the acceptable face of development to a jaundiced world. Plonking a strip of concrete across the landscape then walking away does the opposite.