Bill Ralston, Media Scrum on stuff.co.nz
30 March 2009
"There was an interesting piece of local news reporting in the NZ Herald that, inadvertently, highlighted exactly why we need to super-size the city.
It was a classic parish pump story about how a concerned residents group, the Onehunga Enhancement Society, is fuming at delays, grandstanding and bickering between various duplicitous local and central government authorities over plans to extend a $230 million motorway duplication project across the Manukau Harbour.
As anyone who has tried to drive to or from Auckland Airport at rush hour will tell you the existing stretch of motorway and bridges is a huge time-wasting bottleneck for travellers who really have no other way to get where they want to go.
The government's Transport Authority says it won't wait any longer and it's sending in the bulldozers to plough up the foreshore.
The Onehunga Enhancement Society has let out a primal scream and is reaching for its lawyers to halt the development because Onehunga residents were promised, as way back as 1974, that they would receive nice new sandy beaches in compensation for the destruction left by the original motorway.
For a while it seemed sanity might prevail when it looked like the Transport Authority, the Auckland City Council and the Regional Council were going to front up with the $40 million necessary to reclaim 11 hectares of beachfront.
The Transport Agency said it would cough up $18 million, the Auckland City Council promised $10 million but then the Regional Council did the Aussie haka, patted its bulging pockets and said, "Nah!"
Now, I'm with the Onehunga residents on this one. If someone ploughs beaches under their megabuck motorway construction then the locals are entitled to see their waterfront rebuilt.
I was brought up in the North Shore suburb of Northcote with relatives in St Mary's Bay across the Waitemata. As a kid I watched the vandals from the Ministry of Works completely annihilate several beautiful bays and sandy beaches, leaving nothing but miles of asphalt approach roads to and from the new Auckland Harbour Bridge.
Those suburbs never really recovered from losing their waterfront to heavy traffic and both have been diminished from what they once were by the loss. As a point of interest, anyone who has ever used the Shelly Beach Road ramp on the bridge should know they are passing over a beautiful shelly beach buried many metres below them. A beach that was once used and enjoyed by thousands of Aucklanders.
Enough curmudgeonly ranting about the past.
What seems to be happening now is that the Onehunga Residents will try to legally block the transport agency building the new bridges until it gets an ironclad promise of a new reclaimed waterfront.
Many thousands of commuters will be trapped in traffic jams, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars in gasoline, pumping up our carbon footprint for God knows how long until the legal processes are exhausted,
Why? Because the Auckland Regional Council won't play ball with the Auckland City Council.
That gives this government proof positive that it really does need to take the Royal Commission's advice and streamline the unwieldy, contradictory, parochial system of government that has paralysed serious growth in the region and the country at large.
And while they're at it, can someone think about giving Northcote and St Mary's Bay back their beaches, too?"