Council to pay yacht race staff's $235,000 tab

By BERNARD ORSMAN

Auckland City ratepayers are paying $235,000 for 30 yachting officials to stay in a luxury hotel for a month over the summer.

The hotel account is part of a $1.5 million bill that ratepayers face for the 24-day Volvo Ocean Race stopover.

Members of the Volvo events management team, who are following the yacht race around the world, have been booked into the Ascott Metropolis all-suite hotel while they are in Auckland in January.

Other costs are $155,000 for an arrival concert for the eight yachts, $150,000 for a prize giving for race leg three at the Sky City Starlight Symphony in the Auckland Domain, about $220,000 on media and public relations and $8000 on uniforms for race organisers.

The media and PR costs include $30,000 for helicopters and planes for visiting media, $18,500 for media boats and $17,000 for a website.

Staff of the city council's Volvo project team have taken a ratepayer-funded trip to Southampton on race business at a cost of $6131 and visits are planned to other stopover ports in Sydney and Cape Town at a cost of $4977 and $9838 respectively.

The figures have been released to the Herald under the Official Information Act and have prompted Auckland Mayor John Banks to say he will apply a "magnifying glass" to the race stopover, which blew out in cost from $1.5 million to $3.6 million under the previous council.

The council is contributing the full $600,000 it is due to receive from Team New Zealand to promote Viaduct Harbour. That leaves a funding gap of $1.5 million to be paid for from sponsorship, hospitality and other sources.

Mr Banks, who has come out against spending ratepayers' money on planting a replacement tree on One Tree Hill, received a briefing last week on the race stopover.

"The more I learn about the Volvo race and other commercial transactions of the previous administration [the more that] tells me they were fast and loose with ratepayers' money.

"But having inherited and now being responsible for it, I want to try and limit the cost. I'm going to be having a meeting with the organisers of Volvo on behalf of the council every week. I want to try and get this onto a short chain."

He said ratepayers' exposure looked to be substantially less than the $1.5 million committed to the $3.6 million event.

The latest figures show there has been no progress since September when the Herald reported that the city council's Volvo project team had been unable to secure a cent in sponsorship.

To date, all costs associated with organising the event have been paid for by ratepayers.

The only private-sector backing has been $110,000 of "in kind" work on the media centre.

The project manager for the stopover, Virginia Terpstra, was unavailable yesterday.The council has guaranteed that ratepayers' expenditure on the stopover will not exceed $1.5 million.