KEY POINTS:
Let's guess what Finance Minister Bill English and his kid brother Conor chatted about over the Christmas turkey. The Waterview Connection tunnel perhaps?
One of the documents waiting for the new minister on taking office after the election was the Treasury/Ministry of Transport report on the business case for the Waterview Connection as a tunnel.
Commissioned by the previous Government, it called for guidance from him and Minister of Transport Stephen Joyce "as to next steps". Then early last month, Conor English, wearing his Federated Farmers chief executive hat, appeared in the Herald calling for a review of "the State Highway 20 Waterview Connection tunnel with a view to cancelling it". He argued "this 3.1km 'tunnel with no hill' is costed at about $1.9 billion" and demanded the tunnel be cancelled and the money used instead to build water storage facilities for Canterbury farmers.
"The return to the country will be far greater," he said. To say nothing of the added returns to the pastoralists and cow cockies of the South Island, who have never been slow to take any state subsidies going.
Last Friday, Mr Joyce announced just such a review.
His press release implied that in the year since the tunnel project had been chosen, costs had blown out from $1.89 billion to "in excess of $3 billion".
Which would be very alarming if it were true. But it isn't. In the small print at the back of the Treasury/MOT report, the estimated cost of the tunnel is now $2.005 billion, or just $105 million more than the earlier estimate.
Of course $105 million is hardly petty cash, but in the world of civil engineering estimates, it's hardly the end of the world.
So how did Mr Joyce come to a figure of "in excess of $3 billion"? First, he tossed in the cost of financing the project during the construction period, a figure not included in the earlier estimate. He also decided he wanted to future-proof the tunnel by making it three lanes in each direction instead of two. That alone added $390 million to the project. Widening the tunnel added the extra cost of a new lane in each direction on the highway in the vicinity of the tunnel. He also added the cost of raising the section of the causeway to the west of the tunnel "to avoid the periodic inundation from seawaves".
These last two added a further $240 million.
The subsidence of the Northwestern Motorway into the sea is a long-term problem that has absolutely nothing to do with the Waterview project and will be a cost to be considered whichever option is chosen.
As an aside, the fill from the tunnel was going to be used to build up the sinking causeway. Maybe the officials should add that as a credit for the tunnel in their next report.
Mr Joyce says "the Government cannot sensibly commit to fund a project of this expense and with these limitations without serious considerations of the alternatives". Fair enough, but if he went to the project's informative website, he'd discover this route is one of the most studied projects of all time, going back at least to 1963.
In recent years, the Government's roading agency began the process of selecting "a preferred alignment" back in 2000. From a mountain of reports, three favoured options emerged, two surface options and the tunnel.
The tunnel won out on the grounds of having less impact on the physical and social environment, and being the one most likely to gain community support "in an area with 16 per cent of Auckland City's population". Lost sight of in Mr Joyce's press release was that of the three options, the tunnel was the mid-priced one.
Of the surface options, one would cost $1.9 billion, the other $1.7 billion. The alternative route through Rosebank Rd - favoured by the Auckland Regional Council - was estimated at $2.7 billion.
For a new Government promising action, it's hardly a reassuring start.
The National Governments of the 1990s short-changed Auckland's infrastructure needs for a decade. Could the roar of the farm lobby be enough to signal the Queen City is in for another era of neglect?
