Brian Rudman: Lessons to learn after V8s lunacy

COMMENT

The V8 street race madness is finally over, buried by a planning commissioners' report which found the likelihood of traffic jams and general disruption of life within the city too great to risk.

The folly has cost Auckland City ratepayers at least $750,000, to say nothing of the costs incurred by North Shore City, Transit New Zealand and the other public bodies forced to fight this crazy venture.

But all of these costs are petty cash compared with the likely price the region faced if the seven-year race series had somehow managed to hit the inner-city streets and bring the city to a halt.

I won't go over the details of the decision, which is reported elsewhere.

But it's gratifying to see that the commissioners' trepidations about the proposed venue are the same ones I've been banging away about over the past year.

What is important is that Auckland City learns something from this $750,000 fiasco.

Mayor Dick Hubbard, who inherited the mess from his predecessor, John Banks, issued a statement claiming the consent application was "one of the most in-depth pieces of professional work ever carried out by the city for a temporary event".

It would be nice to think he put his name to this with tongue firmly in his cheek, because if this was truly the most in-depth piece of professionalism the council bureaucracy was capable of, the city's in deep schtuck.

The commissioners found the joint application of the council and promoters IMG defective in just about every area you can think of.

There are obvious lessons. I wrote on Monday about the need to avoid placing council officials in the impossible task of acting as cheerleaders for an event and as the providers of independent, impartial advice to councillors about it.

The biased briefing on the race - now thankfully redundant - prepared for tomorrow night's council meeting underlines my point.

Another lesson is the political one of knowing Auckland is a family of cities living within one house, and we need to get along.

The race bid failed primarily because bully boy Auckland City blithely announced it was going to throw a giant party in its corner of the house, and to hell with the consequences for everyone else living there.

Instead of asking Transit and North Shore City how they felt about closing the main inner-city access to the Harbour Bridge for days on end, Mayor Banks said they could like it or lump it.

Surely a more sane solution would have been for the cities to get together with Transit and other potentially affected parties and decide where best in the region the race could be held.

It could have been a street circuit somewhere else, one that wasn't atop a central traffic artery that risked regional traffic chaos.

Central Auckland would still have got all the side benefits of an influx into its hotels, casino, shops and restaurant, and none of the disadvantages.

Instead we've got nothing, except a large bill and disgruntled petrolheads.

One final lesson. It's past time an official standard was set for the design of event cost-benefit analyses.

As recently as Monday, council publicists were still claiming the race would bring annual "economic benefits" to the city of $34 million despite the council's own independent expert suggesting a figure of less than $4 million.

Even this low figure, reflecting increased business activity but ignoring the inconvenience and disruption to shoppers and residents, is suspect.

The commissioners allude to this in noting that "advice to pack up and get out of town if the noise of the event and the disruption it causes become too great to put up with ... is an extraordinary means of mitigating adverse effects ... and simply not acceptable."

This sort of cost should be reflected in assessing the benefits of future events.

In July 2002, Australian Capital Territory Auditor-General John Parkinson came up with just such guidelines in his investigation of Canberra's disastrous attempt at a V8 street race series. We would be wise to borrow them.


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