Rudman's city: Too little and too late, but Telecom joins street party

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Sweet reason didn't change Telecom's mind. Nor did appeals to be a good corporate citizen. Embarrassment, though, seems to have done the trick.

Months of badgering by the good folk of Devonport - to say nothing of a whack around the ears in this column - have finally forced the telco to agree to remove the row of ugly concrete poles blighting seaside Queens Parade.

Parsimonious to the end, however, Telecom is willing to pay only 25 per cent of the $30,000-odd cost. North Shore City is having to come up with the rest.

As you may recall, dividends from the power lines company UnitedNetworks, which services North Shore, Waitakere and Rodney, are being used to gradually place power supplies underground. Telecom has been asked to join in this community-financed beautification project, but steadfastly refuses.

It argues that if it did it in the North Shore or the west, other communities throughout the country would demand similar service.

Telecom says it has neither time nor money for such prettification when there are battles with TelstraSaturn and other rivals to win, and shareholders to placate.

On the Devonport waterfront, the plan was to put both power and telephone lines to households underground, remove the ugly wires and poles and put up slender, sky-blue "heritage" street lights.

To sweeten the deal for Telecom, UnitedNetworks offered to lay ducting into each house for Telecom at no cost. Trenching, reinstatement of the footpaths and removal of the poles would cost Telecom nothing. All it had to do was to run a wire from its existing underground feeder cable into each house.

Telecom refused, claiming "the cost involved would be difficult to justify when compared to high priority expenditure areas" such as the Southern Cross and new Cook Strait cables and new internet services.

With everything laid on for Telecom, its costs in Devonport would have been piddling. But Telecom remained unmoved. So the power undergrounding went ahead, the flash new lamp-posts went up, the footpaths and front yards were dug up and resurfaced - and the ugly power poles remained. The concrete poles were stripped of their power lines, but still carried a single strand of telephone line.

Yet no sooner had the contractors cleaned up and the resultant ugliness caused by Telecom's intransigence been revealed to all than the phone company started to have second thoughts. Perhaps, signalled Telecom's government and community relations adviser, Rick Osborne, there was a way around the impasse.

He suggested to North Shore Deputy Mayor Dianne Hale that somewhere in Telecom's $25 million-a-year sponsorship pot of gold, there might be a few pennies for Devonport. What about a heritage project, for example?

A nod being as good as a wink, Devonport Heritage soon surfaced with a suggestion that the telephone wires be put undergrounded as a heritage project.

What a good idea, said Telecom, and came up with the ever-so-generous offer to pay 25 per cent of costs, leaving North Shore City to find the rest. The ratepayer contribution will go towards digging up the pavements again, resealing them and taking away the poles.

Telecom seems remarkably publicity shy about this whole patch-up exercise. Not surprising, really, when similarly aggrieved citizens in Takapuna, Glenfield and Swanson are just as grumpy.

In each case, wirescape undergrounding projects have been rendered useless by Telecom's refusal to act the decent citizen and join the project.

Takapuna community board and UnitedNetworks Shareholder Society member Jan O'Connor questions the point of continuing the power undergrounding until Telecom joins in. "If Telecom is going to leave the concrete poles there, it is pointless."

Allen Davies, the Waitakere City chairman of works and a fellow shareholder society member, is equally frustrated by Telecom's attitude.

"I'm suggesting we put signs on the poles which say it's all been nicely undergrounded, but the poles are still here because Telecom are a pack of mean buggers."

Mr Davies, a former deputy chairman of the Waitemata Electric Power Board and an employee in the electrical supply industry since 1963, argues that utilities have a social responsibility to the communities in which they operate.

"When other members of the community are working to make an area look better, I think Telecom should come to the party."

He's not the only one.