Editorial: $31,000 bill over waka galling

The $31,000 spent deciding against using the Waka Maori is 'galling'.

The $31,000 spent to decide that the Rugby World Cup's Waka Maori had no future on Tauranga's downtown waterfront has been slammed as a waste of money.

It's hard to disagree.

From the outset, the waka project was met with resistance from business owners on The Strand who were concerned views of the harbour would be obscured by the 75m-long waka.

Far from revitalising the area, it would simply block The Strand's crown jewel - its views, they said.

The project to revitalise the downtown by Waka Maori becoming a cultural, technology and innovation pavilion was dropped following this criticism of the proposed location on the Northern Strand carpark.

The less intrusive option of putting it on a pier so it jutted out into the harbour was rejected as too expensive.

Ratepayers will rightly question whether the expensive investigation into the project should have been carried out when widespread resistance to the idea should have been anticipated from the beginning.

As reported in the Bay of Plenty Times this week, ratepayers funded the $17,000 council investigation, which used planning consultants Boffa Miskell, while Bay Venues spent $14,000 employing O'Connor Sinclair to do the business case and feasibility study.

Mayor Stuart Crosby says the money was well spent "to make sure the right decision was made".

He says the project was initiated by other parties, not the council and that it became involved because it was on council land and due diligence needed to be carried out.

It was, it has to be said, an expensive decision.

Councillor Rick Curach commented that councillors should have been engaged in the project at an earlier stage because it would have allowed the views of business and building owners to be canvassed before launching into an investigation.

This would have been a more pragmatic approach. If the business owners had been surveyed then it's highly likely there would not have been any need for the costly investigation.