Brian Rudman: Bull-at-a-gate tactics in rush to splurge airport dollars on roads

With all that airport money jingling in their pockets, the Great Road Builder and his allies at Auckland City must think all their Christmases have come at once.

Eastern highways, harbour tunnels, ring roads, upgrading the city's perilous paving. Their big conundrum is picking which row of houses to loose the bulldozers on first. Okay, I was fantasising about the footpaths - that's top of my wish list, not theirs.

You don't have to be a brain surgeon to know the eastern highway is their favourite. More evidence of the hell-bent, corner-cutting pace being adopted for that project surfaced briefly at last week's meeting of the transport committee.

There, the road lobby agreed to try to persuade the regional council to water down some of the planning obstacles standing in the highway's path. In particular, they want the blanket prohibition against building any road through the category 1 environmental protection area of Purewa Creek lifted.

Alarmingly, they plan to get the rule changes underway before any decision is even made about the viability of the highway.

This indecent haste is referred to, in the officials' report to last week's meeting, as an act of prudence.

For eastern highway watchers, it's just more of the "bull-at-a-gate" tactics that have categorised the project since Mayor John Banks assumed office a year ago.

The speed has officials so concerned that just over a month ago, the usually unflappable Jill McPherson, Auckland City's director of planning services, and Manukau City's environmental management director, Leigh Auton, warned politicians of the dangers of haste. Unless enough time is spent on consultation, exploring options to address environmental, community and transport needs, and peer review work, "the end product will suffer".

The top officials were criticising the tight deadlines being proposed for a $13.2 million feasibility study into the eastern highway project. The timetable being proposed was extremely tight, was far shorter than has been achieved for any similar project and carried major financial and legal risks, they said.

Councillors disregarded the advice and voted to proceed with calling tenders for the 12-month review process anyway.

From the outside, the whole consultation process has the appearance of a money-wasting farce. We're told the highway will go ahead only if this $13.2 million review gives it the green light.

Yet we all know that Mr Banks and his allies are staking their political careers on it going ahead - and fast.

From the evidence of last week's transport committee report, the bureaucracy is not above helping them out, either.

In it, it's pointed out that getting a plan change was likely to be controversial and could take 12 months or more. Therefore, even "while the exact alignment of any future eastern corridor is not yet known", it "may be prudent" for the road-building partners - Auckland City, Manukau and Transit New Zealand - to "consider initiating the [plan change] process as soon as possible".

The obstacles that the highway builders face up Purewa Creek are the anti-development protections of the Waitemata Harbour Maritime Planning Scheme, which zones the area as "Conservation" and the Proposed Regional Coastal Plan, which classifies it as "Coastal Protection Area 1", its highest level of protection.

The latter classification is the biggest obstacle. Under the protection area 1 zoning, the removal of any indigenous vegetation, including mangroves, is prohibited.

With the creek being the home of a forest of particularly large mangroves, this is a major problem for the road builders. So is reclamation, which is also banned, along with the use of vehicles, except for an emergency response of conservation management. A highway where vehicles were banned would not be very useful.

There are other restrictions too, but by now you've got the picture.

There's no way of getting exemptions from the listed prohibitions of the coastal protection area 1 zone. This leaves the road builders with three other alternatives.

One would be to have the classification of the Purewa Creek area downgraded to a lower level of protection. Auckland City officials advised against that. "It would be very difficult to argue against the Coastal Protection Area 1 status of Purewa Creek considering the weight of evidence about its value and importance as an ecological area."

Another option would be to make special provision within the coastal plan for the eastern highway. The officials say the disadvantage of this would be having to wait for the exact line of the road to be decided before any application could be made. That, they noted, "could introduce delays in the implementation phase".

The option that councillors decided for, on the officials' recommendation, was to seek a change in the list of prohibited activities within the protected area. Instead of road building being a prohibited activity, they want it to be either "non-complying or discretionary".

Under either, the road builders would then have a chance to argue the mangroves-versus-highways case before the regional council and/or environment court.

Of course, having to seek a variation to the proposed Auckland regional coastal plan opens up another field of battle for the highway's opponents. Not only will they be able to drag that issue through the court system but if they fail, they will have the chance to repeat the process when the highway application proper comes along.

All in all, it's hard to believe there will be any highway in Mr Banks' term of office. Perhaps he should contemplate being the Great Footpath Restorer instead. Not as sexy a title as Great Road Builder perhaps. But think of the love and adoration of the walking public he would attract - and the votes. To say nothing of the money he'd save.

Herald feature: Getting Auckland moving