Brian Rudman: Roads to nowhere versus things that matter

What a fabulous city we could build if every now and again we declared a year's moratorium on new roading projects, and diverted the money into things that really made a difference.

I suspect I might have had these heretical musings in the past, but they surfaced again yesterday as I read Auckland City proudly patting itself on the back for scraping together $4.6 million from various budgets towards a $12.5 million little theatre project off Aotea Centre.

Alongside it was a story about Manukau Mayor Sir Barry Curtis advising proponents of a $3.5 million Youthtown project for Mangere to lower their horizons and aim for a more realistically priced $1.5 million alternative.

This on the day Transit New Zealand was inviting Mangere residents to a consultation session at the local primary school to reveal plans for a $184 million bridge and associated highway development across the Manukau Harbour and through their neighbourhood.

Perhaps, if the locals asked nicely and promised not to kick up a stink about the road, Transit might find a home for the youth facilities beneath the bridge?

In Auckland City, priorities are just as askew. Here there's a budget of $200 million to transform the CBD into that vibrant, world-class, first city of the Pacific vision of the publicist's hackneyed pen. But what's it to be spent on? Mainly ripping up the existing paving and replacing it with Chinese bluestone and tui-feeders and new light poles.

There's $30 million set aside for the Queen St facelift, $1.2 million (and now rising) for the aborted Vulcan Lane makeover, and $2 million for the similarly stalled Khartoum Place tart-up. All of it mere plastic surgery.

But imagine how lively the city would become if the year's budget for these non-essentials was diverted into making a real difference. Like building the new theatre. Instead, the council is dangling $4.6 million in front of the theatre's champions, and telling them to go hustle up the rest.

Perhaps it's my advancing years, but I say, warehouse the bluestone for a year, and get on with projects that will genuinely enrich the city.

Which just happens to remind me of another item on my roads-can-wait wishlist. That's the Town Hall organ.

Last week I got the chance to clamber round the innards of the emasculated instrument with English organ builder Ian Bell. Fresh from overseeing the rebuilding of the mighty Royal Albert Hall organ in London, the most recent of 50 major rebuilds he's been involved in, Mr Bell is fizzing about the "can-do" attitude of the Town Hall organ trust, which has retained him to lead the Auckland project.

He agrees that the instrument is just a whimper of its once-grand Edwardian prime, but promises to bring back the "shake-the-earth grandeur" it once had.

It's a dramatic building, he says, and "citizens are meant to come into it and feel proud if it". Part of that "is the organ suddenly letting go and people saying, 'Wow, what was that?"'

Unfortunately, that hasn't happened since the ill-fated rebuild of the early 1970s. Mr Bell's plan is to rip out those "improvements" and build a modern organ that not just recreates the power and style of the 1911 instrument, but throws in a few modern touches as well.

But getting back to the point. The probable cost of this restoration? No more, it seems, than the $3.2 million-plus being talked about to redo Vulcan Lane and Khartoum Place.

Given the controversy surrounding those two projects, I know where I'd be putting the money first. That's into an instrument which, when Mr Bell is finished with it, will be, he says with no false modesty, "internationally known".

But like the little theatre, our city fathers and mothers are treating the organ as a luxury present that we kids will only appreciate if we save up our pocket money to pay for it.

Some time back, the council promised a miserly $1 million towards the project. A trust has since been formed and told to raise the rest. The ASB Trusts at one stage offered to match the city's contribution and I'm presuming that offer is still live. But that still leaves another $1 million or so.

Perhaps the solution is to rename it Organ Bypass and get it on the transport agenda. Then it would be up and blowing by Christmas, with a queue of politicians claiming credit.