Rudman's city: Councillors vote for own whopper sandwich boards

Once councillors had rid the central city pavements of advertising sandwich boards, you would have expected them to realise they were on to a good thing - that citizens like walking along uncluttered and visually unpolluted streets.

But no. Having taken away the eyesore with one hand, the city councillors now plan to give it back with bells on. Cash register bells.

For the sake of a quick buck - $300,000 a year - the council's investments committee has agreed in principle to turn the five biggest city-owned carpark buildings into giant advertising hoardings.

How inappropriate that phrase "in principle" can sometimes be.

As for the advertising, we're not talking subtle or selective. We're talking sports-stadium saturation.

Inside the five parks - Downtown, Victoria, Civic, Karangahape Rd and Fanshawe St - 84 locations have been identified.

Outside, a further 11 potential "large-scale advertising" sites have been ear-marked. Of these, five are on the Downtown building, two at Victoria St, three at Fanshawe St and one on the Karangahape Rd building.

To demonstrate its warped sense of good citizenship, the city plans to retain control over editorial content and will ban liquor, cigarette and sexually explicit material.

To me, the true obscenity is permitting the signs on public buildings in the first place, not in the occasional illuminated beer bottle or neon nipple the councillors want to protect us from.

The investment committee, chaired by City Vision's Vern Walsh, supports the advertising "in principle" because it adds to the parking building company's profits.

It's a shame one or other of the high-falutin' principles that litter the city's various vision statements and annual plans was not the starting point instead.

For example, the Auckland Vision 2020 documents circulated for public consultation just over a year ago said that as part of the drive to foster the "First City of the Pacific" image, "council will encourage visual display and design with a Pacific theme in buildings, open spaces, streetscapes, sculptures and other public artwork."

Advertising hoardings hardly fit that bill.

If the parking buildings were running at a loss, I guess the council could at least have the excuse that the hoardings were helping to lessen the cost burden for ratepayers. But that's not the case. The city parking building empire, particularly with the recent ramp in charges, is a good little profit earner.

In this financial year the council will make a tidy profit of $5.2 million from parking fees. And that's after costs - such as wages, depreciation and a whopping $4.8 million it has to pay to itself in rental for the parking buildings - are deducted.

It's not as though the council even plans to use the hoarding income to reduce exorbitant hourly parking charges.

"It can't be totally discounted," says Mr Walsh, but "I don't envisage seeing a reduction."

The crazy thing is, I'd just sat down to write this piece when I had a call from one of the investments committee members, Kay McKelvie. She had just returned from a conference in Seattle and wanted to tell me about the ban on billboard advertising in the City of Seattle.

She had gazed out her hotel window on her first day and tried to pick what it was that made the city seem different. Then she realised. A minimum of signs. City councillors had banned new billboards in 1977 and introduced serious controls on existing signs.

The absence of signs grew on Mrs McKelvie. She became a convert.

The pity is, she arrived directly from the airport to last Thursday's committee meeting too late to sway fellow members or cast her vote on the matter. In fact, she says, she wasn't even aware it had been discussed until I asked how she had voted.

Because the vote was "in principle," one can only hope that the Mayor or Mrs McKelvie or one of the councillors big on "vision" forces a proper debate on the issue.

Did no one on the council contemplate the precedent being set here? That private carpark owners were likely to request the same licence to pollute?

More basically, did none of our leaders think that maybe some pieces of public sculpture or wood carvings on the bleak concrete walls - both inside and out - would be more appropriate. More "First City of the Pacific"?