Rudman's city: Road to the future could be paved with inequities

During the summer I was impressed on a visit to the poshest part of the Eastern suburbs by the inground lawn sprinkler system installed by a citizen in the council-owned berm outside his property. How civic minded, I thought.

Not to be outdone, the nouveaux riches of the North Shore have now gone one better.

They are raiding their milk-money jars in search of cash to finance improvements to the public roads outside their homes. Improvements which North Shore City says it cannot afford to provide.

If you haven't already guessed, we're talking the old perennial, chipseal versus hotmix road paving.

Over the past few years, one threat that the poor and rich of Auckland alike have had to share is the arrival of the dreaded chip seal truck.

No respecter of wealth or station, the truck arrives one day to pour tarseal and stone chips on to your road, leaving it a noisier, stickier and uglier place.

No matter the screams of anguish, councillors across the isthmus gamble that this roar is nothing to the screams they would be subjected to if rates suddenly rocketed to cover the three to four times higher cost of repaving with the quieter, more popular, smooth hot mix.

That was until this week anyway, when North Shore City came up with a third way. On a split vote councillors decided that if residents were willing to pay the difference between the smooth and the chip, they could have the smooth.

The decision was based on the one-off deal done in November 1999 with the well-heeled residents of Bournemouth Terrace, overlooking the America's Cup course off Murrays Bay.

The roadway was in the throes of being rebuilt when residents requested it be finished off with hot mix. The council's response was that a chip seal finish would cost $6100 while hot mix would cost $21,000.

If the residents could come up with the difference, hot mix it would be. The hat went around and two-thirds of residents responded, chipping in the required $14,840.

North Shore City is now proposing to adopt much the same process as part of the new policy.

It will take a back-seat role in the preliminaries, leaving it up to self-appointed street leaders to cajole, bully, shame or otherwise persuade their neighbours to write out their cheques.

Works committee chairman Bruce Lilly suggests households would face a bill of $500 to $1000 on top of existing rates.

While feeling rather uneasy about employing wealth as a way of rationing council services, I do concede it is hardly a new approach.

Back in August 1999, Rodney District residents who complained that the dust from the unsealed district roads was polluting their water tanks and roadside grazing land were offered a solution.

For $475, the district would spray 100m of roadway alongside the farm with a substance that controlled the dust.

North Shore residents can also get together and petition the council to underground neighbourhood power and telephone cables. If the council decides to go ahead, it can force all the street's ratepayers - even opponents of the scheme - to pay up over three years.

But precedents or not, the idea of the better-off being able to buy better road surfaces than the poor sniffs of an alien, two-tiered form of democracy. What next? A rich person's "Koru Club" in the local park?

The scheme also throws up some interesting variations.

If the rich, for a suitable consideration, can pave the streets outside their places with gold, then can the poor revert to loose gravel and ask for a rates rebate?

And what about the hold-outs who refuse to join in their neighbours' smooth-seal project. Could they be penalised by red crosses on their letterboxes, or worse, by having a strip of chip seal laid in front of their houses as a constant and noisy reminder of their non-participation.