Brian Rudman: Foot on the V8 brake, please, Dick

COMMENT

Tens of thousands of dollars in fees will start oozing out of the public purse into the pockets of lawyers, consultants and commissioners over the next four days with the re-opening of resource consent hearings into the doomed V8 street race around Victoria Park.

That's unless Auckland City's lawyers jump up this morning and withdraw the city's support for this project - or at least ask for an adjournment until the newly elected council can vote it dead.

If this doesn't happen, ratepayers should be asking why not.

Less than a month ago, Mayor Dick Hubbard and 10 of 19 Auckland City councillors were elected to office having campaigned against the proposed Victoria Park race site.

Mr Hubbard made his view clear in an interview with the Herald's Chris Barton.

No other city that hosted V8 races, he said, had them at a choke point in its arterial system.

At the time, I was chuffed to see his alternative "better venue" was one I'd proposed long ago, along Tamaki Drive and up and around Paritai Drive.

But now in office, Mr Hubbard and his deputy, City Vision team leader Bruce Hucker, who campaigned on the race being "a great idea in the wrong place", are behaving as though nothing has changed. Well knock knock, guys, who won the election?

Their game plan, it seems, is to let the hearings proceed, await the commissioners' verdict, then put it to the vote at a council meeting on November 25.

Either they're hoping the commissioners will do their dirty work or they're expecting some magical revelations over the next few days that might change their minds.

But as Mayor Hubbard's council is joint-applicant for the consent, he doesn't have to sit through four days of hearings to discover whether his boffins have solved his campaign-trail worries about arterial road haemorrhage.

All he has to do is call for a report.

From the pile of reports issued on October 12 in preparation for today's hearings, the answer is, they haven't solved those worries. Not up until then anyway.

All these reports did was to confirm that there would be traffic chaos without "vehicle trip suppression", which included a 40 per cent reduction in trips across the bridge to the CBD, a 20 per cent reduction in trips from the north across the Victoria Park flyover and a 30 per cent reduction in trips into the CBD from everywhere else.

The hearing was adjourned on August 5, at the request of Auckland City and fellow applicant IMG, after it became clear how deficient their paperwork had been.

The commissioners suggested the applicants take the opportunity to provide further information on a range of issues, such as traffic management plans, adverse noise effects, the effect on Victoria Park as an important open space and the extent to which alternative sites had been considered.

The last two have not been addressed.

And another issue strangely absent from the reports is how the applicants are going to achieve the 30 to 40 per cent reduction needed in vehicle trips.

Of course, throw enough money at it and most problems can be mitigated. But how much money? And who is going to pay?

So far, ratepayers and IMG seem to have paid $500,000 apiece.

IMG is now crying poverty and on October 1 wrote to the council saying ratepayers should cover any further resource consent costs.

These facts were all available to the new council last month.

They confirm the trepidations expressed in the election pledges of the mayor and the majority City Vision team, that the proposed race is in the wrong place.

But instead of calling a halt and stemming the wasteful flow of ratepayers' money, the Hubbard team is acting as though John Banks' name is still on the mayoral door. Why?