Rudman's city: Historic houses fall into legal loophole

By BRIAN RUDMAN

The professors have got their wish. Auckland University has been granted the right to demolish the three historic merchant houses at the corner of Symonds St and Alfred St without having to go through the unpleasantness of a public hearing.

The university has got its way by reviving feudal-like powers it once enjoyed to do what it liked on its own patch. It has submitted an "outline plan" for the work instead, a process in which no resource consents are needed.

It is a loophole which is legal but, to use the words of Auckland City senior planner Earl Brookbanks, is also "most unusual".

You'll recall how just over a month ago the university sought resource consent, on a non-notified basis, to bowl the three old buildings and erect a four-storey student amenities and electronic library in their place.

A non-notified hearing means a project can be nodded through by council without resort to public consultation. Council planners recommended a non-notified process because the effect of the project would be minor and all affected people had been given an opportunity to say so.

The two commissioners, councillors Juliet Yates and Kay McKelvie, were not so sure. After an initial hearing, they postponed their decision for a week. On the morning of the second hearing, I wrote of the commissioners' discomfort with the application and called on them to insist on a notified hearing so the professors would be forced to justify their plans in public.

That same morning, before the hearing began, the university faxed a request that the proceedings be deferred until further notice.

One presumes they saw the writing on the wall. But backdown it wasn't, more a regrouping.

The university fell back to its old ability "to designate" land for university purposes. This was the exercising by the state of its power to lord it over the rest of us. The Minister of Education, for example, retains this power to designate land for schools and other educational bodies, but the universities lost the right with the passage of the Resource Management Act in 1991.

Auckland University had a trick up its sleeve, though. Well before 1991 the university had designated much of the existing Symonds St campus for university purposes. This designation was incorporated into the city council's "operative district plan".

This designation remains in force even though the university can no longer designate land. More to the point, the university can rely on this designation to undertake works while the operative plan remains the legal plan.

There is a proposed new plan in which the designation is dropped, but that is not expected to come into effect for a few years yet - well after the three old buildings will have hit the dust anyway.

All in all, it's a rather sneaky and devious way by the university of avoiding a public hearing into what it plans to do - tactics worthy of the white-shoe developer brigade rather than the city's intellectual elite, one would have thought.

The university's submissions - and a victory press release - make much of the widespread consultation it had with "stakeholders" and of the support of the students' association. An e-mail from student president Kane Stanford dated June 8 last, which is included in the submissions to the council, suggests we take all this with a grain of salt - because of voluntary unionism.

Mr Stanford says he does not have the ability to speak on students' behalf. He says a survey of all students was conducted on this issue but "the response was low". "Students," he added, "are slack with these sorts of things."

Within the "outline plan" process, the university seems to have bent over backwards to act responsibly. Far from exploiting the freedom the process permits, the professors have been eager to go along with the resource consent conditions that Mr Brookbanks proposed as part of the original resource consent hearing.

They have even bound themselves to enforcement procedures if things go wrong, which they had no need to accept. All of which is commendable, but it just goes to underline the reason for resorting to their "most unusual" course of action - the desire to avoid public debate over the bowling of the old houses.

Of all institutions, you might think the university would have been the last to run scared of explaining its actions in public. If the professors can't put up a good case and convince Aucklanders that what they're about to do is reasonable, then who can? And if they can't convince us, then maybe it's because their actions are wrong.

Of course it's all academic now. The university has gained the rubber stamp it wanted and any day now the historic houses will be history - in all senses of that word.