Editorial: Bridging public funding gap

It must have been a good Christmas lunch for the boffins and bean-counters of the New Zealand Transport Agency. How else to explain a $41 million blowout to the budget for strengthening the Auckland Harbour Bridge clip-ons?

It was clearly one of those lunches where you order the nice, cheap and cheerful bottle of pinot noir for $20, then the waiter arrives with the bill and you realise - oops - you inadvertently ordered that $41m bottle of top vintage burgundy instead. But wasn't it nice?

The bridge bill almost doubled overnight, prompting transport minister Steven Joyce to forlornly enquire as to whether he couldn't have been given just a little bit of warning.

It was the steel, says the NZTA, 920 tonnes of it. (Originally they said they would need only 313 tonnes, then 600 tonnes, then 760 tonnes.) That, and the difficult access to the bridge's box girders, increased labour costs, and the unforeseen need to move the water mains under the bridge lest they get crushed by all that extra steel. Oh, and high inflation. (This, as inflation sank to its lowest level in five years.)

This remedial work is not being done to preserve the landmark bridge for future generations. It's being done to keep it standing for, say, another 10 or 20 years. Heavy traffic restrictions will still be needed, and the risk of "catastrophic failure" cannot be entirely discounted. The bridge can only be used as long as maintenance workers can keep pace with the developing fatigue cracks, says consultant engineer Beca.

One more thing: these upgrade costs don't allow for the much bigger 53-tonne truck-and-trailer units that will be allowed on our roads from February, which are expected to reduce the bridge's life expectancy by several more years. Indeed, the Auckland Harbour Bridge is not even included in the $85m bill to strengthen 306 bridges on our state highways to allow for the heavier trucks.

Perhaps those numbers were too big to contemplate at lunch.

So all this means that, yes, the Government will need to begin building a new Waitemata Harbour crossing, probably in the form of four parallel tunnels, in the next 10 years. There is no alternative, short of shutting down the petrol stations and rolling out bicycles to 1.4 million Aucklanders.

The rest of the country may laugh at Aucklanders' reliance on the combustion engine, but at present there is no other way to get tens of thousands of people from the rolling suburbia of the North Shore to the high-rise offices of the CBD.

And who will hold the public budget for the building of this new crossing? That would be the NZTA. Yes, the same agency that has proved itself unable to cost-effectively manage some bracing on a bridge.

Indeed, a booze-up in a brewery comes to mind.

This is the agency that allowed the cost estimate for the Victoria Park motorway tunnel to increase from $320m to $409m.

This is the agency that oversaw the original plans for the Waterview tunnels, which ballooned to at least $2.77 billion, including financing, before the Government stamped on them.

And it's the agency that threatened a $100m increase to its $230m budget for widening Auckland's Southwestern Motorway and building the bridge across Manukau Harbour, if it was to be obliged to comply with the city council's resource consent requirements.

If NZTA can't stop the bridge-strengthening project from almost doubling in cost to $86m, how will it control costs on a $4 billion harbour tunnel, a 10-year project?

Some of that money will come from ratepayers. Some will come from taxpayers nationwide. Much will almost certainly be raised through government borrowing - which essentially means the Superannuation Fund investing our retirement savings in the harbour crossing.

Public convenience. Public safety. Public money. More is at stake in the management of the new crossing than just shaving a few minutes off north Aucklanders' commuting time.

Steven Joyce must hold the NZTA to a much higher standard of accountability. There should be no more surprises - either for the transport minister or for the public.

Yes, changes to big construction projects mean they will sometimes go over budget. Public infrastructure works seem particularly afflicted.

But that is not an excuse for repeated financial blowouts.

It is, in fact, all the more reason to demand higher management standards from the Transport Agency.