Brian Rudman: Memo to would-be mayors: The port company is not your plaything

Ports of Auckland agreed to public access - as long as it didn't affect cruise ship activities. Photo / Steven McNicholl

Andrew Williams is not going to be the first mayor of Great Auckland, so his promise to deliver a cruise ship terminal on Captain Cook Wharf within three years is not worth fretting about. But to keep hearing Len Brown, one of the two front-runners for the job, make the same sort of pledge is alarming.

Particularly when he says it in the same breath as promising to deliver a waterfront master plan within a year of taking office. If he's already made up his mind where to site this controversial piece of infrastructure, then why the charade about a master plan?

A master plan implies open-minded parties sitting around a table and coming up with the best solution.

His main rival, John Banks, has wisely said this is a matter to be left until after the election. It's not because he's chickened out. It's just that as Auckland City Mayor, he knows the problems of dealing with the port company. Especially when it involves a wharf fully owned by that institution.

Sure, Ports of Auckland will be a fully owned subsidiary of the new Auckland Council. But that doesn't make it a plaything of the new mayor. It has a board of directors who will be answerable to one of the new council-controlled organisations - presumably Auckland Council Investments, which is charged with bringing "a strong commercial focus to the ownership and governance of the Auckland Council's major investment assets".

The problem for Mr Brown is that the port company has already struck a very advantageous deal - for Ports of Auckland anyway - with the Government and the Auckland Regional Council about siting a new cruise ship terminal on neighbouring Queens Wharf.

This year, Auckland Regional Council and the Government handed over $40 million to the port company and promised to build a new cruise ship terminal at no cost to the company. In return, the port agreed to public access - as long as it didn't affect cruise ship activities.

Crucially for the ratepayers of Auckland, it also agreed to cover the costs of the long-term maintenance and upkeep of the under-wharf structure, and accept responsibility for dredging and berth maintenance. That's on top of annual operating costs for the wharf of $4.1 million, which ratepayers face.

I was no fan of the rushed decision to site a cruise ship terminal on Queens Wharf, and am delighted a final decision was put on hold until a master plan process can be conducted looking at the future of the whole waterfront area. That said, any such debate now has to take into account the deals already made over Queens Wharf. For example, why would the port company continue with the vital upkeep of Queens Wharf if there's no cruise ship terminal on it.

A year ago, port managing director Jens Madsen said that with Queens Wharf gone, Captain Cook Wharf was the only place left for car-carrying roll-on ships to berth.

At peak times, up to 4000 cars are parked there, and he said it would take eight to 10 years to find somewhere else to unload them.

Even if that were to be fast-tracked, Captain Cook Wharf is considerably shorter than Queens Wharf and would need to be extended significantly to handle the 320m-plus liners expected in a few years time.

Given the port company's past refusal to fund a cruise ship terminal, the cost of extending the wharf for Mr Brown's new terminal will fall to the ratepayer, with the costs of the new terminal itself.

The plans for a terminal on Captain Cook came to prominence earlier in the year when Sky Tower architect Gordon Moller proposed it as a better solution than Queens Wharf, arguing that two ships could berth simultaneously at his terminal whereas, with the ferry fleet expanding along Queens, two ships could be a problem there.

Maybe he and Len Brown are right, but the new city structure is supposed to be about giving up the bad old ad hoc practices of the past and starting afresh. There's much emphasis put on the importance of the new spatial plan, to be drawn up as the grand guide map to the city's future development. Within that will be the master plan for the waterfront. But what Mr Brown is offering is more of the old silo mentality. Someone in high office grasping hold of a bright idea for a single problem, without much thought for the bigger picture. Or the end costs.