Big projects on back burner

North Shore councillor George Wood, middle, believes Aucklanders are being "blackmailed" into accepting tolls. Photo / Natalie Slade

Councillor says prospect of work delays raises possibility of tolls and higher rates.

Key Auckland transport projects - including some on which work has already started - face long delays unless new funding can be found from road tolls or higher rates.

That has prompted North Shore councillor George Wood to allege Aucklanders are being "blackmailed" into accepting tolls.

Public transport will be hit hardest, including several interchange projects such as one for which groundworks have begun for buses to meet trains at Otahuhu, as the $2.4 billion underground railway swallows most of the sector's capital funds.

But resealing of roads and footpaths will also be curbed as Auckland Transport sheds $3 billion from a previously indicated $9.8 billion on capital works over 10 years.

The interchanges face delays until at least 2020, and the council body says the Otahuhu project will have to be abandoned in June without alternative funding, even though it is needed to support a major reorganisation of southern bus and rail services next year.

Other transport interchanges facing delays include those proposed for downtown Auckland, Wynyard Quarter, Te Atatu and Manukau.

A long-planned $52 million upgrade of Dominion Rd also faces a year's delay, until at least 2016.

Auckland Transport has earmarked just $81 million over the first five years of a "basic" 10-year network budget for public transport projects other than the City Rail Link (CRL), for which it is allocating $1.7billion.

The tail end of its electric trains order will take up $28 million of the $81 million, and it will cost $21 million to expand the Hop ticketing scheme and introduce unitary fares across most forms of public transport.

But the agency acknowledges that roading "renewals" will also have to be chopped by hundreds of millions of dollars.

That will result in a deferred maintenance backlog of $1.25 billion, leaving an increasing proportion of roads in "a poor or very poor condition", says chief financial officer Richard Morris in an email to Mr Wood.

The councillor called that "scary stuff".

"I think people are kind of being blackmailed to try to get them to sign up to tolls," he told the Herald.

Tolls are one of two options recommended by a panel of advisers to Mayor Len Brown for raising an extra $300 million of annual transport funding, the other being higher rates and fuel taxes.

Mr Brown would not be drawn on the "blackmail" claim, except to highlight a $12 billion gap over 30 years "between what a growing Auckland needs to keep moving and what it can fund from current revenue sources".