KEY POINTS:
The campaigners from the Onehunga Enhancement Society got a bit more than they expected when they sought the Auckland Regional Council's backing for their campaign to beautify their waterfront.
ARC chairman Mike Lee dismissed their proposal as "sub-optimal" and said that "if a job's worth doing, it's worth doing well".
The society had already enlisted the backing of Mt Roskill MP Phil Goff and the Auckland City Council for its $30 million plan to create a series of artificial headlands and five sandy beaches west of the planned new expanded Southwestern Motorway. Access to the new beaches would be by two footbridges.
But Mr Lee asks what's the point of "spending a fortune on building sandy beaches" if you have a very busy state highway between the seaside and the people, acting as "a sort of Berlin Wall".
His solution is a covered trench, no more than a kilometre long, down which the eight lanes of traffic disappear, leaving pedestrians free to access their new pleasure gardens at ground level. He proposes room also for rail and for the ugly powerlines now defacing the waterfront.
Mr Lee said the campaigners came seeking leadership, but "leadership is not just following the mob and going along with something that is half-baked". It's "looking at the whole problem and looking at what is ideal. There may be some practical and financial difficulties that rule this out but it should ... be looked at seriously and no one had looked at it at all".
The latter remarks were more, one suspects, directed at candidates in the coming general election who have suddenly shown a great love of the Onehunga beach.
Pushing for the Berlin Wall solution on the Government side is Mr Goff, while National's candidate for the neighbouring Maungakiekie electorate, Sam Lotu-Iiga, is backing it in his role as a city councillor and chairman of the city development committee.
Writing to Mr Goff, Mr Lotu-Iiga and Mayor John Banks, a former National Cabinet minister, said this "very special and unique foreshore" was "a great asset to the people of Auckland" and criticised the Transport Agency's offer to build a footbridge over the new highway as "still well short" of what was needed "to do a high-quality job".
Mr Goff, in turn, wrote to the council, the ARC and the Transport Agency noting the "enormous damage" done to Onehunga Bay over many years and said that "despite promises made at the time of building State Highway 20 in the 1970s, restoration of the foreshore area had not been undertaken".
He called for a commitment from all three bodies to make up for lost time.
The locals' plan, understandably drawn up with cost uppermost in their minds, is indeed sub-optimal. Who will want to lie on a beach slapbang alongside an eight-lane highway while peering at the small print on the sunscreen to check whether it also protects from the radiation beaming down from the clothesline of 220,000-volt electricity cables draped directly overhead.
The idea for a cut-and-cover tunnel was advanced last year by local resident Colin Tunnicliffe and adopted by commissioners from the city and regional councils and Manukau City in recommendations made to the old Transit NZ when the road builders sought support for plans to build outside their existing motorway designation.
Transit dropped these plans at that stage, claiming the conditions would mean it missing Rugby World Cup 2011 deadlines.
So what? I'm sure not a rugby player or fan will notice the difference.
The poor old Manukau Harbour spent most of the 20th century as Auckland's open sewer. As a kid, I remember cycling across the old bridge looking up the harbour towards the three great abattoirs, watching and smelling the reddish-brown untreated effluent swirling underneath.
Before the meat industry arrived, it had been a harbour for swimming and boating and food-gathering. In recent years, across on the Mangere side, Watercare and Manukau City have done a magnificent job bringing their part of the harbour back to life.
On the city side, the slaughter-houses have long gone, but remediation is just a broken promise to trot out during election campaigns.
It's time we got serious. If we can afford to tunnel under Helen Clark's electorate, then why not a smallish trench in Onehunga?
