In some areas, my team, the council’s Healthy Waters and Flood Resilience department, can use engineering to create a solution – and in some areas, this isn’t possible.
What we’re doing in the Wairau catchment, with the proposal to redevelop and restore part of A.F. Thomas Park and the Takapuna Golf Club site into a flood storage wetland, has spurred passionate debate. Who wins when we try to balance flood resilience with community recreation?
This is not, and has never been, a question of golf versus flood resilience.
We will always work hard to balance the needs of the Wairau community and the Aucklanders who – we know – love and use A.F. Thomas Park and Takapuna Golf Club. Recreation, including golf, has never been off the table.
We’ve seen great support for sport and recreation, and we’ll do what we can to accommodate these needs and preferences – and that includes golf. However, I want to be clear – we cannot and will not prioritise this over the urgent need to protect people’s lives and properties from extreme flooding and delay the progress of a viable project that we know will reduce the flood risk for so many Aucklanders.
This proposal to restore part of the park area to a wetland will increase flood storage from 60 million litres to 550 million litres – that’s equivalent to 220 Olympic swimming pools.
This means that the majority of the land at A.F. Thomas Park can still be used for year-round recreation purposes. The wetland area could also include walking and cycling tracks built around it. This is not a case of the council taking green spaces away from the community. We’re proposing to share them, to help us enhance the area for the protection of the neighbours in Milford and the Wairau Valley.
The project aims to significantly reduce downstream flood flow through Wairau Creek, reducing flood risk to over 250 homes and three residential care homes in Milford. It will also protect critical infrastructure and access to key facilities such as North Shore Hospital, the Westlake Boys High School, the Westlake Girls High School and Eventfinda Stadium, a venue that sees 400,000 users a year and which in its current state is very vulnerable to flooding. It was severely damaged in the 2023 floods.
We must not only think about those in their homes and businesses but also the serious risk to pedestrians and those using the roads when flooding occurs.
A major focus of Making Space for Water is creating a series of blue-green networks across the region. This is a system of waterways (blue) and parks (green) that give stormwater the space to flow to help reduce flooding where people live.
This is what we want to do in the Wairau catchment. We want to create more stormwater storage and wetland spaces, in order to increase how much water the green space can hold during a flood. This will mean that when there is heavy rain, the water has a dedicated place to go – improving flood resilience for the homes and businesses in the area.
The work in A.F. Thomas Park is a critical first step in reducing the significant flood risk across the Wairau catchment and will enable wider flood resilience works in and around Nile Rd and the commercial areas of Wairau Valley. Without these Stage 1 works, we cannot progress with Stage 2 and Stage 3, which will have even more benefits.
As the majority funder, this project has been approved by the Crown and is a unique opportunity to leverage central government funding. We’re currently assessing the feasibility of the design concepts, including Takapuna Golf Club’s proposal. Then it will be up to the Kaipātiki Local Board, in consultation with the community, to determine the best recreational use of the site.
In May, more than 200 community members gathered at Eventfinda Stadium to hear an update on this project. Many who had been personally affected expressed strong support for swift and decisive action to address flooding to their homes and businesses and shared what this work means to them.
We’re tasked with making Tāmaki Makaurau stronger and better prepared for extreme weather – such as what we saw in 2023 and even the recent flooding we’ve seen this year. We take this seriously.
In Wairau, I know that, together, we can balance this with recreation needs and, yes, with golf, as well. But I also know that any decision we make cannot come at the cost of protecting peoples’ lives, homes and businesses. That’s always going to be our first priority.
