KEY POINTS:
Auckland City Council and the Auckland Regional Council have volumes of purple prose promising to guard, protect and venerate Auckland's field of volcanic cones.
But even the most exquisitely crafted of mantras is worthless unless those doing the preaching believe in their cause.
Two months ago, we had Auckland City officials upholding a 2005 resource consent letting a house builder hack a building platform into the side of Mt St John.
A senior council planner's excuse was that the 1915 law prohibiting steep cuts into Auckland's volcanoes had fallen off the radar and the resource consent had sort of slipped through the system.
Now we have Environment Court judge Craig Thompson rapping the council over the knuckles over redevelopment plans for the former Mt Wellington quarry site, next to one of Auckland's biggest cones.
Judge Thompson gave the council and developer Landco Mt Wellington until today to come up with something better that follows the statutory mantra about preserving volcanoes.
Once again, the hero of the day has been the volunteers of the Volcanic Cones Society, who stood up in court and highlighted the shortcomings in the council's backing of Landco's plans.
It's worth pointing out that the other official guardian of our landscape, the ARC, backed the Landco-Auckland City approach.
How embarrassing to both it must have been to have the judge say that the disputed interface between Mt Wellington and the new residential area had to be redesigned to recognise the issues raised by the society.
All the society had done was point the court and the council to the various planning documents.
In a nutshell, the society opposed plans to site blocks of housing, one block five or six storeys high, on or against the lower slopes of the northern face of the cone.
Originally, Landco offered this land to the city as part of its reserve contribution, but council officials said no thanks, it wasn't suitable for recreational purposes.
In his submission, society spokesman Greg Smith said the one thing that could have made this huge urban redevelopment project unique in the world was the volcanic cone of Mt Wellington. He noted that the society and the council backed the campaign for World Heritage Status for the volcanic field and highlighted the council's volcanic management strategy which, among other things, talks of preserving and enhancing the natural volcanic landscape.
He noted it would be difficult to enhance the majority of the cones, which were surrounded by residential and commercial development, usually extending well up their slopes.
The northern face of Mt Wellington and the empty quarry site were probably the last clean-slate approach for enhancement of a volcanic cone in Auckland. This opportunity had not been grasped.
Judge Thompson picked up on this argument, citing the visual intrusiveness of residential and commercial developments to the east and the west of the proposed development. He talked of the value to residents and visitors of seeing the cone emerge from ground level rather than from behind rows of houses.
The city council says it and Landco will today file for an extension to Judge Thompson's deadline. That's good. It will give both sides time to hammer out a more volcano-friendly solution.
In the six years of wrangling over this site, the bureaucrats seem to have got so bogged down on issues like stormwater and roading that the mountain dominating the whole project got overlooked.
Which brings me back to the Mt St John fiasco of two months ago. At the time, I asked what was the use of ratepayers paying $3 million for the special rate to protect the volcanoes if the bureaucrats didn't care.
I suggested the first priority was to educate city officials. The Mt Wellington situation reinforces this.
It's time also to refocus the city's new volcano department. As far as I can ascertain, all it does is decide on management matters such as which grass species would be best for Mt Eden and where the next track should go.
It should be given a planning focus as well. Indeed, I'd turn it into something akin to the Ministry of Women's Affairs and insist that any council decision related to a volcano pass through this department first.
That way the bureaucrats might finally get it into their heads that volcanoes really matter.
