Wayne Brown, engineer and Mayor of Auckland.
As mayor of Auckland I am fighting a constant battle with Wellington bureaucrats to enable Aucklanders to actually decide what we want and get in the city we love.
On top of ridiculous things like us not being able to decide how much parking fines should be in our city, there are a string of other annoying laws that should have been sorted out years ago.
New Zealand has a perfect record of overestimating the benefits of major projects and underestimating the costs. Where cost explosions are best shown is in tunnels, with the City Rail Link (CRL) project already over budget by a billion dollars.
Fortunately the Government canned the underground light rail before that became a nightmare, but foolishly it is still funding consultants to investigate a cross-harbour tunnel that would cost about the same as our total annual trade with China. Even more foolish is the proposed tunnel to the airport in Wellington.
Not only are tunnels notoriously expensive, but they are afflicted by a bizarre law. Here in NZ, property owners own not only the surface land but what is beneath all the way to the centre of the earth, so anyone digging a tunnel has to buy the rights to be under that land, even in many cases when the tunnel is 70 metres underground.
Just recently YMCA tried to shake down the council for $18 million for having the CRL tunnel many metres below. The courts cut that to $1.8 million, but even that is ridiculous. If CRL had simply said to YMCA – “Prove that we are there” – it would have cost YMCA over a million to drill down to prove it. What possible reduction to their use of the land occurs from a tunnel many metres below? None, actually.
This law continues to bedevil underground projects, and should have been changed so that ownership only extends, say, five metres below ground level, or to a depth that actually might impact the surface users.
I have some experience of this nonsensical law. After being appointed to chair Vector following the disastrous weeks-long CBD power outage in 1998, I found that Vector had started an underground tunnel to supply power to the central city. Does this tunnel go in a straight line from the Penrose substation to Liverpool Street? No, the tunnel twists and turns to follow the roads above to avoid paying surface-dwellers for being 75 metres below. Not only does this increase the length of the tunnel but tunnel-borers go round corners even worse than a Lada, all at increased costs.
The cross-harbour tunnel, supposed to be a council partnership project, is in fact a waste of money that has not been shared with council at all. The Government should can this immediately and ask why the obvious route across the harbour using Meola Reef and a short bridge isn’t top of the list. It would cost a fraction of the proposed tunnel, take way less time, open up a new northern growth area, and link more directly with fast-growing West Auckland.
If we are to progress tunnels, and there is a place for some that might pay their way, then get rid of ownership to the centre of the earth.
And, returning to an earlier point, let us decide the correct size of a parking fine.
The drones at the Ministry of Transport are considering increasing the $12 fine by inflation to $20, which is still not enough to persuade people to actually pay for their parking.
We have inherited some stupid rules. If you drive in a bus lane that might slow a bus the fine is $150, but if you park there and stop the bus it is only $60. Who thought that up?