Editorial: Fish-hooks in ARC bequest to Super City

Every few years the Auckland Regional Council has published a comprehensive stocktake of the region's environment. It has just produced its last.

This year, the ARC and all the region's local bodies will be replaced by a single Auckland Council. The swan song of an environmental monitor is a valuable document.

If the ARC was previously inclined to paint too dark a picture of air pollution, water quality and other elements of the urban environment, to make a case for improvement, it is unlikely to have done so this time. A dark picture would be an admission of failure for a council at the end of its life.

The temptation this time would be quite the opposite: to issue a glowing testament that the new environmental managers would find difficult to maintain. The ARC has not done that either.

We headed our report on its findings: "Our Failing City". We highlighted the rate of population increase - 50 people a day, requiring 21 new houses and putting 35 additional cars on the city's roads every day along with heavier loads on rubbish collections, drains and other infrastructure.

Stormwater pipes and sewers, many of them old and not sufficiently separated, overflowed 2500 times in 2008, fouling beaches and leaving them unsuitable for swimming. Aucklanders have been hearing about this disgrace for a lifetime, and paying for it to be fixed for almost as long. Yet progress seems not to be keeping pace with population growth.

For all that, this ARC report, the council's third since 1999, suggests coastal water is cleaner than it used to be, beaches are usually safe for swimming and streams, though still polluted, are not as bad as before. While car use is rising, so is patronage of public transport. And though we have become fairly diligent at separating household rubbish for recycling, the amount sent to landfills is growing faster than the population.

It is a story of growth, not change, and that is true also of residential preferences. Despite the proliferation of apartments in recent years, the average house is getting bigger and fewer people are living in it.

The city continues to sprawl outward as well as filling in vacant space within its designated zones. Albany, Flat Bush and Dannemora were farmland a few years ago.

The ARC has spent much of its urban planning energy resisting popular trends rather than serving them. It will be interesting to see whether the Auckland Council has a different instinct. With all of the region's rates at its disposal it will be able to concentrate more resources on the city centre to balance the centrifugal forces that drive urban sprawl.

But equally, it could question the conventional view that sprawl is more expensive to service than higher-density housing would be. It is hard to believe that laying new water pipes, sewers and the like is prohibitively more costly than laying larger pipes in existing streets.

High-density development within existing zones would be beneficial for the economics of public transport, particularly by rail, but transport planning needs to follow residential preferences, not dictate them.

Like other regional councils, the ARC has been primarily an environmental watchdog. The Auckland Council will have a more comprehensive brief, though much of it may be statutorily managed by so call council-controlled organisations at arms' length from the elected body.

The ARC's last 'State of the Region' report is likely to be a lasting reference for its successor.

It bequeaths the Auckland Council much work to do to match population growth with infrastructural improvements. Its successor will be invested with more financial muscle and will be expected to make a difference.