Rudman's city: People power behind drive to bury remaining lines

By BRIAN RUDMAN

In 1984 the old Auckland Electric Power Board launched a 40-year programme to underground the company's power lines. By 1998, when the project was abruptly cancelled, more than 60 per cent of its wirescape had been buried.

Last week the AEPB's successor, line company Vector, pledged to revive the stalled undergrounding enterprise. The time needed to bury the remaining 30-plus per cent? Another 40 years.

Such is progress.

Still, we should be grateful for small mercies. If it hadn't been for pressure from the elected trustees, this city-friendly programme would have remained stalled.

My sources indicate there was a good old brawl between, on the one hand, the trustees who have a mandate from you and me, the owners, to underground, and on the other, the directors and management of the company, who are not so keen.

Indeed, the latter were more than happy to leave things as they were, or if they had to, to spend no more than $5 million on it annually. The trustees insisted on $10 million and, after some table-thumping, got their way.

For someone who remembers, just over a year ago, Vector chief executive Patrick Strange apparently lauding a $400 million plan to bury the remaining wires within 10 years, the present management and director-level reluctance is rather confusing.

Back in 1984 the old power board decided, for environmental reasons, to gradually underground existing overhead power lines. Since the 1960s, all new subdivision lines have had to go underground.

By 1988, around $8 million a year was being spent by Vector on the undergrounding project. This level of spending went on until the 1998 power crisis brought it to a stop.

It bounced back on the public agenda in April 2000 when Dr Strange enthusiastically outlined the 10-year project.

"We are keen to move forward with undergrounding," he declared in an April 19, 2000, press release which can still be found on the Vector website. "We'd like to see the unsightly power lines and poles go just as much as our customers would." He added it "would cost some $400 million to remove the remaining power lines ... within the next 10 years."

He said the "outstanding question was how undergrounding could be funded." He offered three options: a rise in prices, a decrease in dividends paid or a new source of funding.

It was the last option that gives the clue to why the company was suddenly keen on reviving the issue of undergrounding.

By launching a hugely expensive, 10-year plan, it gave the then trust chairman, Michael Barnett, a new chance to ride his old privatisation hobby-horse. By waving the enticing prospect of a wire-free landscape in front of our eyes, he then declared the only palatable way to pay for this was to sell a 20-25 per cent stake in Vector.

He was banking on consumers preferring a part-sale to a cut in dividends, in achieving the wire-free dream. The election that year was to prove how wrong he was.

The non-privatising, pro-undergrounding candidates from both ends of the political spectrum achieved a clean sweep. Privatisers such as Mr Barnett were dumped.

Now it appears the 10-year plan he was pushing was hokum. Even Dr Strange admits to me it is not really a practicable solution - though at a pinch it might have just been possible.

"If you threw every resource in the world at it and were prepared to pay too much for contracting and turned Auckland upside down, 10 years is probably the very minimum," he now says. However, "I'm not sure there are even the resources to do it that quickly."

He says even the more modest, $10-million-a-year project that has been adopted will be "stretching contractor capacity."

Ten years or 40, the good news is that parts of the remaining wirescapes of Auckland City, Manukau City and parts of Papakura are on the way out. I say parts of, because Telecom shows no inclination to join the party.

The ideal would be for Telecom and Vector and the other utilities to join with city authorities to develop a cooperative undergrounding programme which included extra ducts for future expansion. I suspect, though, that that's a dream for the science fiction writers, not real life.