John Roughan: ARC needs to be chopped off at the legs - again

My little corner of paradise lies deep in a valley of bush drained by a weedy creek that carries suburban run-off into one of Auckland's bays.

A few years ago North Shore City engineers thought it would be a good idea to bowl some of the bush and dam the valley for the benefit of several properties downstream that were prone to flooding after heavy rain.

The simplest and cheapest solution was to widen the creek but there was a problem, we were told, with the Auckland Regional Council. The ARC believed there were fish in it.

Our murky, briny little "marine habitat" evidently contained not only eels but quite possibly smelt, bullies, banded kokopu, short jawed kokopu, even giant kokopu ...

Fortunately the valley also contains the retired professor John Morton and his wife, Pat, whom we have to thank for nurturing the bush over many years.

In a long career at the University of Auckland Professor Morton probably taught the ARC environmental staff everything they know about zoology. Word has it that he quietly wrote to the guardians of the regional environment suggesting they not be silly.

In any event, the dam plan seems to have disappeared.

That was my only personal collision with the ARC before its first direct rate demand arrived in the mailbox this week. I'll be taking a closer interest in its work from here on.

Like all Aucklanders with long memories, I know our regional council is unlike others. It predates them. Beginning as a public transport board, it grew into the Auckland Regional Authority in an era when some people were excited by the idea of a whole new tier of government wedged between Wellington and the local bodies that looked after mundane services.

By and large local bodies were less excited by the idea and for 30 years Auckland's municipal politics were a story of tension between parish jealousies and the imperial logic of the ARA, often called an octopus.

About 10 years ago, when the ARC, as it had become, was newly installed in an overpriced palace in Pitt St, a merry Minister of Local Government, Warren Cooper, came along one day and chopped off almost all its tentacles: the yellow buses, the newly acquired port of Auckland, the rubbish tips, everything except the parks which the council had always run well, and the planners, who did not do much anyway.

The rump was to be like every other regional council - not much more than an environmental monitor. The octopus shrank back into the shadows, nursed its wounds and waited.

It performed its environmental chores with all the frustrated energy of a clipped noxious weed. My little creek was just one example.

Eight dotterels nest in the path of a new motorway lane for buses from Takapuna to the Harbour Bridge. The ARC ordered a halt to the work while the birds were offered alternative accommodation.

A bank of shelly sand, possibly the ancestors of Coromandel Maori, has been airlifted from Thames and dumped in Shoal Bay. We are to see whether the dotterels find it comfortable. If not, the bus lane might be back to the drawing board.

Charming really. I'm far more concerned about a development on the other side of the bridge where daily I fear my next collision with the ARC will occur. And it will really hurt.

The council has lent its support to a dangerous little campaign that is delaying the widening of the motorway over Victoria Park. It wants that stretch of motorway put underground.

The most ludicrous suggestions can take hold of local bodies when somebody else - in this case the state - is expected to pay. The Victoria Park flyover is the worst bottleneck in the system, causing tailbacks and sudden lane changes as traffic divides for the city or the south. The flyover has also been a feature of the urban landscape for 45 years and trees have grown to maturity around it.

The structure was there long before Freemans Bay became gentrified and the residents, who now feign to find it intolerable, moved in with the knowledge it was there.

If the flyover is to be widened, they say, the whole thing should be put underground - at nearly three times the cost. Once you bury the road, of course, any future widening becomes fearful.

If this idea takes hold, I'm told, it could set a financially frightening precedent. Tunnels will be demanded every time. Roading funds will not go nearly as far and car travel will be steadily less well served. You might suspect that is the real intention; you might be right.

Good government keeps its distance from different forms of transport and allocates money to those that can show the greatest benefit. The ARC is not interested in keeping a distance; it wants to run public transport again.

The real Government has restored the right of regional councils to run a railway and that is what the ARC means to do, although the constituent city councils want to run it too.

The Government has already had cause to regret giving the ARC its head. The first thing the outfit did was agree to a grossly excessive price with Tranz Rail for the Auckland tracks.

The Government stepped in and renegotiated the deal but still ended up paying a sum the Treasury considered about four times the asset value. It is far out of proportion with the cost the entire national network is carrying in the buy-back offers now.

A country of four million people - the size of a modest city elsewhere - probably can produce no more than one competent government. But if we are going to suffer another burst of "regional government" at least we are going to see the bill.