By Dr Joel Cayford – North Shore City Councillor
Member of Auckland Water Review Working Party
Published NZ Herald - 14 December 2000
It is a frightening fact that most of Greater Auckland’s growth decisions are being rushed by traditional engineers and well-meaning councillors - despite the huge capital costs involved and the community risks. Recent decisions reveal an alarming absence of economic analysis – as if large sums of capital are easy to come by. And they indicate a reluctance to adopt alternative approaches, failure to learn from mistakes and overseas experience, and a lack of awareness of massive technological change.
Like many cities, Greater Auckland has grown in an ad hoc way. Witness its spread of roads, housing, commercial areas and water infrastructure. To stop sprawl the Auckland Regional Council imposed a Metropolitan Urban Limit and drawn lines on maps. North Shore City Council objected but lost in the Environment Court. Now Manukau City Council and Waitakere City Council are straining at their lines and want new greenfields opened up for development.
Old behaviour and traditional developer expectations will take time and strict enforcement to change. The line of least resistance is to develop new land because it is harder to redevelop existing urban areas of Greater Auckland. Policy favouring brownfield development is easy to write but difficult to implement. However if sprawl is to be stopped then planners and developers must change direction and use existing urban land more efficiently. There will still be quarter acre paradise properties, but there is now a need for intensive housing which is attractive and creates a sense of community.
Councillors sitting as commissioners in North Shore City have made some appalling planning decisions. Whole rows of houses have the garages and backdoors of other rows of houses as their main view. Hundreds of low cost houses will never enjoy a thriving streetscape because they are built up long concrete driveways. And thousands of new homes are forced into car dependency because there are no shops, community facilities or parks for miles, and some streets are too narrow for a bus.
The original vision of high quality intensive housing with community focal points has collapsed into an abysmal reality of low cost housing clusters, populated by new settlers and by internal New Zealand migrants desperate for employment. The market is for cheap housing in these greenfield areas.
Even a cursory skim on the internet reveals North Shore City’s biggest mistake has been speed. In other countries new urban development is carefully and deliberately staged over time. Successful and attractive communities grow slowly, just as North Shore’s existing seaside villages did in the past. The main beneficiaries of high speed development on the North Shore have been developers.
Some blame the Councillors, and demand that building professionals should make planning decisions. But this ignores the importance of independence. Similar arguments have been used to support the separation of Council water services, their establishment as LATEs (Local Authority Trading Enterprises), and the appointment of professional directors. There is a touching belief that people with business experience will somehow be better at running city water and wastewater services.
Watercare Services Ltd, Greater Auckland’s bulk supplier of water and wastewater services has been run as a LATE by directors for several years. Under their direction, advised by engineers, and supported by the majority of city councils, Watercare has committed to loans in excess of half a billion dollars. Most of this is for the environmental upgrade of Mangere – despite inconvenient evidence that far greater environmental damage was being caused, and is still being caused by leaking trunk sewer networks across the region, mostly the responsibility of councils.
The rest of the money has been allocated to rushing ahead with the Waikato Pipeline – despite evidence that water demand management methods significantly reduce the amount of water used and could have deferred that expenditure. Education has reduced water consumption in Christchurch, and many cities around the world. Metrowater’s successes in reducing water demand in Auckland absolutely contradict Watercare’s water consumption projections. In fact Watercare’s directors, faced with less than projected revenues, suddenly imposed price increases of 6% for bulk water in the year ended July this year.
Just as the region must face up to using land more efficiently, so too must it use its water resources more efficiently. More water supply, means bigger water pipes, bigger sewers, more wastewater treatment, more investment, and more debt.
Other paradigm shifts are in play. Development in filtration, ultraviolet and other water technologies has driven down the cost of water treatment, while the costs of labour intensive pipes and sewers – despite trenchless diggers, continues to escalate. Small de-centralised or local sewage treatment is now more economic than large centralised systems – even ignoring the huge uncosted subsidy the poor old environment expends coping with trunk sewer overflows and leaks.
Each kilometre of trunk sewer rehabilitated in North Shore City has cost around $1,000,000. Current estimates suggest it will cost the city $300,000,000 to rehabilitate its public sewers, and that many households will have to pay $3,000 plus each to repair the sewer line to their property boundary. This is a huge sum of money to simply move excrement around the city. I have been advised of a range of alternative onsite technologies for sewage management. Tried and proven community based cluster alternatives exist also. New thinking is needed to avoid hasty expenditure on old technology pipe networks which may become white elephants.
Passenger Transport infrastructure investment is the third challenge facing the region. There is pressure from some quarters to spend huge amounts of capital on large projects including a Second Harbour Crossing, Railway lines and the North Shore Busway. Yet again, international experience and economic wisdom points to the best approach being an incremental one. By all means protect corridors for future uses, but in the short term the most appropriate investment strategy is to identify routes which are the most congested and provide a passenger transport alternative for those. Auckland City’s bus priority measures are an excellent example of this approach. Bus lanes are an efficient use of existing roads. Transfund’s Patronage Funding gets it right by requiring a proven increase in passenger use in exchange for funding. Just as it takes time for communities to grow, so too, does it take time to establish effective passenger transport systems which are trusted by the public.
The sudden availability of capital through LATE bank loans, through Infrastructure Auckland opening its purse hastily, or through government capitulating to Mayoral pressures – carries the risk of building infrastructure not needed for today’s needs, and which may never be needed tomorrow.
Business people have answers, so do councillors, and so do engineers. But nobody has all the answers. Community participation, openness to change, and incremental development over time needs to be part of Greater Auckland’s governance.