KEY POINTS:
Auckland has four years left to present its best possible face to the world for the 2011 Rugby World Cup. Ask most Aucklanders what they would most like to be done and the answer is predictable: smarten up the downtown waterfront. The Viaduct Harbour, redeveloped to host a major international event, was a good start. Now we need to do something about the wharves nearby, and we are not talking about those to the west of the Viaduct.
Unfortunately, Auckland local bodies are talking about the area to the west - that is all they are talking about. The regional and city councils have recently taken another step in their painstaking progress towards the Tank Farm by agreeing on a corporate structure, a company called Wynyard Management with a board of representatives from Ports of Auckland Ltd and regional council subsidiary, Auckland Regional Holdings.
It hopes to have the first stage of the development, an entertainment strip on the western side of Viaduct Harbour connected by a pedestrian bridge, completed in time for the World Cup. That is a welcome ambition but not nearly enough. Something must be done about Queens Wharf, Captain Cook Wharf and Marsden Wharf, the "finger wharves", as the port company calls them, in front of the Ferry Building and the infamous red fence.
Queens Wharf is the centrepiece of the waterfront. It is a harbour ferry terminal and so it can remain. But upgraded terminal facilities share a wharf with ugly sheds and lines of offloaded cars.
Something much more attractive and accessible to the general public as well as ferry passengers can be built there within four years if councils put their minds to it.
Captain Cook and Marsden wharves were the site of the Sports Minister's waterfront stadium proposal. Trevor Mallard aimed to provide the World Cup venue and give the Auckland waterfront a facelift with the same project. Citizens made it very clear a sports stadium was not wanted there, but nobody except the port company wanted to keep those wharves for bananas and cars.
The port company is the problem for plans to improve Auckland's waterfront without delay. The port long ago moved most of its commercial operations eastward to the container wharves but it is reluctant to give up its surplus property without obtaining full value for it.
That means releasing the redundant wharves slowly and "sequentially", as ports' chief executive Geoff Vazey, phrases it, lest it floods the commercial property market. Hence it has agreed to develop a few blocks west of Halsey St by 2015, the rest of the Western Reclamation, including the Tank Farm, by 2030 and maybe the finger wharves by 2040. That is an eternity.
Mr Mallard's stadium proposal proved, if nothing else, that the port company need be no obstacle to a determined public development. The Auckland Regional Council, which ultimately owns the company, could cut through its intransigence without interfering with its commercial operations.
The council need only take the advice of one of its own members, Joel Cayford, and charge the company a lease for the wharves.
That would be in line with normal commercial practice, it would ensure we indeed got "full value" from the property the port occupies and it is a fair bet the company would quickly decide the wharves on the downtown doorstep had better uses than as parking space for imported cars.
Let the plans proceed west of the Viaduct but let us also agree that area will be a long walk from the city centre. If visitors for the Rugby World Cup are to see us at our best, we need to get to work on our central waterfront, now.
