Brian Rudman: Lawyers go dry as peace rules

File photo / Ross Wiggins

The glass tower lawyers who dine off the battles between Auckland local bodies might soon find themselves short of spare cash for restocking their wine cellars.

As the day of the great forced marriage between the reluctant eight councils looms, the unthinkable is happening. The councils are trying to resolve all outstanding disputes between one another before they plight their troth on November 1.

For however acrimonious the fight has been, the combatants accept how ridiculous it's going to look in the Environment Court on November 2 if the QC for the Auckland Council has to stand up and tell the judge he's now acting for both sides in Auckland Regional Council versus Auckland City Council on, for example, wastewater discharge from "party central" on Queens Wharf.

Last September, in recognition of the revolution to come, the eight chief executives agreed to "accelerate the resolution of appeals between councils".

At the time there were 287 outstanding appeals and related actions either between councils alone, or involving a third party.

By November the number of disputes had risen to 355, though it rapidly settled back to a figure of 311, where it now stands.

The good news, I guess, is that as of April 6, 35 actions had been settled and another 194 had reached the stage of officer agreement. That left 47 cases where the officers cannot agree - down from a peak of 122 in November - and another 35 where further investigation is required.

Officers are now considering which appeals are too hard to resolve and should be rushed to the Environment Court before November 1.

All heart, the Environment Court has offered to schedule additional appeals to help speed the process.

Of course from the ratepayers' point of view, it wouldn't be such a bad thing if the unresolved issues were just carried over to the new Super City organisation to be resolved in-house. The savings in legal bills would be substantial. Just how big, I haven't been able to track down, though one insider says the ARC legal bill alone for such cases is hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.

What sort of issues? A quick Google search throws up a random cross section. Papakura District Council versus ARC in Environment Court over definition of rural versus urban activities. Auckland City Council/Metrowater and North Shore versus ARC against "Auckland Regional Plan; Air, Land and Water".

Then there's the ARC taking on Auckland City for changing "the objective, policies and criteria relating to the remediation of contamination at Wynyard Quarter".

In return, there's an ACC appeal against the ARC's tinkering with the volcanic cones viewshafts.

The metropolitan urban limits boundary is a popular battleground.

There's a report of North Shore City heading straight to the Court of Appeal challenging the ARC's right to set urban boundaries.

Rodney District is similarly challenging the ARC over its proposed rezoning of 9.6ha of coastal land.

The ARC pops up appealing against an Auckland City demolition permit for Building 5 at Green Lane Hospital, and gets a slap on the wrist and ordered to pay $100,000 costs by the Environment Court for opposing an Auckland City decision to allow the expansion of a Waiheke Island airfield.

Some of the existing disputes hark back to the Local Government (Auckland) Amendment Act 2004, which had the purpose of, among other things, requiring Auckland authorities to change their plans "to integrate the land transport and land use provisions and make those provisions consistent with the Auckland Regional Growth Strategy".

That the local bureaucrats are still trying to adapt to the growth strategy document, seven years after this act was passed, is a salutary warning against expecting any instant miracles after November 1.

It's also a justification for the radical reforms we're now undergoing.

The big test is how open and, dare I say it, uncorrupt can we keep it. One advocate of the change admitted to me he has trepidations.

The existing decision-making, while at times frustratingly slow and expensive, was also open, transparent, court-based and honest.

With the new Auckland Council, much of the decision-making will be in-house and political. More like Australia. Whether this will be better or worse, time will tell.