Tree fiasco pushes Queen St upgrade up $6m

The cost of the Auckland City upgrade has risen from $23m to an estimated $39.5m. Picture / Richard Robinson

The cost of upgrading Queen St has blown out by up to $6 million after the tree fiasco that saw the Auckland City Council abandon plans to axe exotic trees for a native theme.

Council officers estimate the 11th-hour policy change will cost between $2.6 million and $5 million with a further $1 million budgeted to beef up consultation and other costs on the troubled project.

This will take the cost of the upgrade between Customs St and Mayoral Drive to $36 million since the Christmas-New Year outcry over the removal of 20 exotic trees in stage one.

There is a further estimate of $3.5 million for the cost of completing the last leg from Mayoral Drive to Karangahape Rd.

At an emergency meeting in January, the council decided 17 of the 20 trees would go but would be replaced by other mature exotics.

Mayor Dick Hubbard said the extra costs were largely a result of penalty payments to the contractor from deferring work and redesigning the street to change the location and size of tree pits, footpath alignments and balcony positions for tree canopies.

Mr Hubbard said nobody liked extra costs but it was apparent at the time of the furore that there would be extra costs.

The council accepted the extra costs "to make sure we got the Queen St project right", he said.

He said that in hindsight the council should have been more up front with Aucklanders about what was planned for the trees to avoid the additional costs and delays to the project.

On top of rising costs for Queen St, the council yesterday decided to spend a further $1 million a year on communications, consultation and other costs for the central-city upgrade.

This follows the string of controversies where officers have been accused of running roughshod over the public: the Vulcan Lane row over red-pebble pavers, the suffragette memorial in Khartoum Place and the Queen St trees.

Much of the $1 million will go to increasing the size of the CBD project team, from nine to 20 staff.

The project team also contracts between three and five project managers, depending on the workload.

Chief executive David Rankin said it had become apparent that the CBD project team was under-resourced for the $150 million plus of spending over 10 years.

"We have been trying to run it [CBD project] on too light a resource."

Mr Rankin said it was also obvious from Vulcan Lane, Khartoum Place and Queen St that more effort and skilled people had to go into communicating with interested groups and the public, and other issues like planning to avoid disruption.

Heart of the City chief executive Alex Swney said the extra $1 million was testing the goodwill of CBD ratepayers who were picking up the tab through a targeted rate to upgrade the central city.