OPINION
After all the flood damage and with all the planning, recovery and resilience work the city now needs urgently, the Auckland Council is about to debate a plan to raise rates by just 1 per cent.
This comes on top of the net 4.66 per cent rise already proposed for the 2023-24 year, which begins on July 1. Auckland’s rates rises will remain among the lowest in the country, and, despite the extra boost, are still not keeping up with inflation.
Council officials have advised that the extra money will add $20 million to the city’s “capacity to prepare for and respond to future storm events”. That includes “more frequent clearing of drains as well as increased provision for things such as emergency management, waste disposal, building inspections and support for affected people”.
Aucklanders will undoubtedly welcome the priority now given to this work, but is it enough?
The proposal will be debated at an extraordinary meeting of the council tomorrow, ahead of the draft budget going out to public consultation at the end of this month.
Although the draft was adopted on December 15, only two months ago, other changes are also proposed.
Currently, it’s proposed to eliminate the “regional contestable grants”, saving $8 million. That would affect the Santa Parade, Pride Festival and all sorts of community events. Now, officials say: “In further investigating these proposals … staff have identified that there are not $8 million of regional contestable grants to put forward as savings. Rather, the amount available is $3.4 million.”
In papers for tomorrow’s meeting, they recommend the grants budget be cut by $3m, not $8m, and that the $5m shortfall be made up using debt. It’s not clear yet what that $3m would eliminate. Councillors agreed informally to the proposal in a workshop last Friday.
A proposed cut of $20m to other “regional services such as community and education programmes, regional events, economic development and other social activities” appears to remain in the plan. So does a $16m cut to local board funding.
And so does a $27.5m cut to funding for Tātaki Auckland Unlimited, the council agency that runs the zoo, art gallery, sports stadiums and a range of economic and tourism initiatives.
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The papers reveal Tātaki has tried to talk the mayor’s office and council’s finance officials out of the $27.5m cut, because it was already trimming its budget by $17m.
“The additional service impacts will mean that council funding of economic development activity will cease and there will be a material reduction in visitor attraction activities,” say the council papers.
These cuts are all proposed despite repeated assurances by mayor Wayne Brown that he understands the value of community programmes and facilities like the zoo, that he wants to increase the powers of the local boards, and that he does not think staff providing frontline services should be worried for their jobs.
In not-unrelated news, there is no mention anywhere in the council papers of any plan to boost tree planting. Nor is there any intention to restore the funds for bus services, or any other climate-related programme, that has been “reprioritised” out of the Climate Action Targeted Rate.
What a weaselly word that is.
Councillors met last week for their first full meeting of the year. They began by standing for a minute’s silence to remember those who lost their lives and suffered in so many other ways in the storm that hit Auckland on January 27.
Then they voted unanimously to ask staff “to prepare advice on the impacts of the Auckland Anniversary flooding event on Auckland’s land use planning, regulatory, infrastructure and other policy settings”.
They want to debate how to stop developments in places that are prone to flooding and other adverse climate-related impacts. This is on top of the independent review of the council’s response to the Anniversary Weekend crisis, being led by former police commissioner Mike Bush.
The mayor and some councillors already had their own ideas about where the damage had been worst.
During the meeting, Brown said that in his experience, having been out and about with people cleaning up, the heritage suburbs had weathered the storm well. But newer suburbs built on flood plains were in trouble. “We’ve got a bit more brave or foolish,” he said. “I’m not quite sure which.”
In fact, the picture is more complicated than that. Mt Eden and Mt Albert, both long-established and full of villas, were among the worst-hit suburbs that weekend. And as councillor Richard Hills pointed out, there were some new subdivisions where the drainage and other infrastructure had been done well, and they had coped well as a result.
On the whole, though, Brown was probably right: Most parts of the circle of villa suburbs around the central city came through relatively unscathed.
Partly, it’s because they were not built in swampy valleys. Partly it’s because they’re the leafy suburbs: full of mature trees, on public as well as private land. A large tree, it is said, can capture more than 40 per cent of the rain that falls on it.
The villa suburbs have been protected from development and many councillors want to keep it that way. If they can cope with big storms now, why risk that by letting them change?
But councillor Shane Henderson, representing West Auckland where there was a lot of flood damage, saw it very differently. “We have locked out people from building on the best land in the city,” he said. “We have to confront this.”
This conflict suddenly has renewed urgency.
At their meeting, councillors will debate the budget changes and the public consultation plan for their draft budget. Worth remembering: While just over half the Auckland population is of European ethnicity, in the past five years between 62 and 88 per cent of all individual public submissions to council plans have come from that demographic.
The council, to its credit, wants to hear from everyone. There will be online avenues and public meetings and there are also plans to make “recorded councillor panel discussions” available, so we can hear them explain what they think the budget means for their area.
What’s at stake? The headline item is Brown’s desire to sell the council’s 18 per cent shareholding in Auckland International Airport. But for most people, the bigger impact will surely come in the budget’s treatment of climate issues and local communities.
There are easy ways to look at these things and harder ways. It’s probably easy to agree we need a “spongier” city, where green spaces are designed to manage stormwater overflows and channel the floodwaters away from homes. It’s certainly easy to agree we don’t want to cover everything in concrete.
Much harder, though, to recognise that this isn’t an argument for endless urban sprawl. For a range of environmental and social reasons, we still need density. We just need it done well. Including in the villa suburbs.
And it’s going to be super hard to get a consensus to rethink our use of the enormous public spaces already at our disposal. That is, the roads.
But it’s what a lot of this boils down to. On the one side: An argument that says Auckland does not benefit from having so many enormously wide roads. We could, instead, have more trees, more grass, more flood protection, more of all the pleasures of parklands, and more road safety, fewer emissions and more localised community amenity.
On the other side, there’s the relentless desire to keep driving everywhere, all the time. And there’s the flooding that goes with it.
Councillor Mike Lee has been especially disappointing on this. He’s argued for better stormwater, but as the new councillor for Waitematā he did his best to stop the much-needed improvement of stormwater services on Meola Rd, leading to Pt Chevalier.
On October 19, just a week after being elected, he wrote to the mayor about this and related projects. In the letter, he asked Brown to “instruct management of Auckland Transport to put this project on hold and order the council Treasury department to halt funding to AT for these projects until further notice”.
Why? Because, it seems. they included cycleways.
AT, feeling the heat, paused the projects. (Update: Following initial publication of this story, Lee posted on Facebook that he now supports the Meola Rd plan. But his post has since been deleted. We await developments.)
Council has to rethink all of this now. Just as it has to rethink its attitude to local communities.
They are the core unit of emergency response and of our much wider urban resilience, and of how we grow as citizens in a city. Cutting the funds to community groups and events is the last thing the council should be doing.
The New Zealand Defence force has a budget shortfall of $130 million.