KEY POINTS:
The gaggle of private consultants who came up with the latest plan to ferry visitors up Mt Eden must have confused their Auckland City commission with one from the Sultan of Brunei, or billionaire Alinghi boss, Ernesto Bertarelli.
Who else do they think can afford to splash out $14.9 million on an untried, driverless system involving 16, four-seater personalised rapid transport pods. Even the favoured $3.17 million alternative of three, 36-passenger, rubber-wheeled trains, is eye-wateringly expensive. Especially when annual operating costs will add $1 million to either option.
Could we have a price for the versions without gold-plated wheel rims please?
After all, the free electric City Circuit bus service carries 1.25 million passengers annually - the same number as the Mt Eden service is expected to meet - for around $700,000 a year.
Agreed, the volcanic cones have been disgracefully short-changed for decades and the city's belated attempts to make up for past neglect are to be applauded. But proposing unaffordable remedies is only going to end in tears and recrimination.
The biggest worry is that tour operators have indicated they're likely to bypass Maungawhau-Mt Eden if their buses are banned from the mountain and that could have a major impact on the approximately 800,000 annual visitors to the summit on coach tours. No doubt it would also have a major impact on which ever unlucky maunga the tour operators decided to invade instead.
But sticking with Mt Eden, a major fall-off in visitor numbers would mean larger ratepayer subsidies, not just for the electric train service, but for the $6.9 million to $8.7 million visitor centre also being proposed.
A centre to explain the role of Mt Eden and the other cones in Auckland's cultural and geological past is a great ambition. But without a plan for where the money and expertise is coming from, we do risk just adding another file to Auckland's dusty shelf of good intentions.
As far as the visitor's centre is concerned, it seems an ideal outreach exercise for Auckland Museum. Not only do they have the expertise and the archaeological treasures, but they also have the regional funding.
As for the electric train service: If the cheapest our city bosses can come up with is $1 million a train, plus $1m annual expenses, let's test the air by calling for private tenders.
For those of us who worry about the city's obsession with Mt Eden at the expense of more threatened cones like Mt Wellington, a letter to the Herald from September 1929 reveals what a long battle it has been. Written by popular travel writer and long-time chairman of the One Tree Hill Domain Board, H.B. Morton, it was forwarded to me by retired Auckland Museum ethnologist David Simmons.
Mr Morton began by criticising plans to plant on the sides of Mt Eden. He wanted the same policy as he had followed with One Tree Hill of planting on the lower slopes but with "no interference with its natural outline as viewed from any point of observation around Auckland. The ugly, aggressive clumps of pinus insignis on the sides of Mt Eden carry their own condemnation."
Then he really let fly. "I would ... protest against the vandalism which is burrowing into most of the beautiful and characteristic volcanic hills around Auckland. Mt Smart and Mt Albert are doomed, chiefly by government action. Mt Eden and Mt Wellington are being torn away. An ugly rent is being made even into the side of One Tree Hill by the present trustees of the domain."
Mr Morton records how he travelled to Wellington some years before and convinced Prime Minister William Massey to introduce the 1915 act, which popped up 90 years later to rescue Mt Roskill.
The legislation was, writes Mr Morton, "to mitigate the effect of this ruthless spoliation. Any excavation in these hills was to leave an angle of not more than 40 degrees and the resultant slope was to be planted with trees or shrubs. Alas, no one cares! It is nobody's business to protect and preserve our scenic beauties and instead of the specified angle, steep and ugly precipices are being left by the action of our local vandals."
The battle for Mt Roskill revealed that vandals still lurk. But, dare I report back to Mr Morton, that finally, it seems we have them on the run.
