Editorial: Dubious pet projects need to be stopped

Len Brown. Photo / Richard Robinson

Opinion

Click here for the 'Idiot's guide to the Super City' to see how the new Auckland Council will work.

In the run-up to the Super City, attention this week has rightly centred on mayoral aspirant Len Brown.

The Manukau City Mayor has now apologised to city councillors for breaches of the council's credit-card rules that continued even after senior staff warned him to provide correct documentation, and the Auditor-General will investigate his spending.

The sums of money involved in Mr Brown's misbehaviour are, however, actually small beer when compared with other dubious expenditure that is coming to light as the region's eight local authorities enter their dying days.

It is becoming apparent, in fact, that we are in something of a danger zone.

The latest example of misuse is the $120,000 that the Auckland City Council's finance and strategy committee has voted to spend on commissioning a history of the council from 1989 to 2010.

The Citizens & Ratepayers councillors who have mandated the initiative seek to justify this on the grounds that the money will come from all councillors and community board members who forwent a pay increase last year and this.

Never mind that this money should be spent on something far more worthwhile. Richard Northey, among the Labour and City Vision councillors who voted against the book, noted a proposal to provide accessible street furniture in Aotea Square. Doubtless, all ratepayers would have their own spending preference.

Never mind, also, that the money is being spent on a work which, no matter how worthy, will be of interest to few and read by even fewer.

Two previous volumes covering the history of Auckland from 1871 to 1989 hardly featured on bestseller lists. C&R representatives have dominated the council on all but three of the years of the subsequent period, and probably envisage a tame, hagiographic volume.

In time, an uncommissioned historian would surely come up with a far more interesting and relevant work.

This project, which has the support of the mayor, John Banks, has more to do with vanity than value for ratepayers. In that, regrettably, it is far from alone.

Take, for example, the $15 million to be spent by the Auckland City Council to buy, demolish and rebuild elsewhere a wholly adequate Mt Roskill school, so Monte Cecilia Park has a better frontage to Hillsborough Rd.

The park is barely known to most people and hardly more than a stone's throw from Cornwall Park. To compound matters, the second part of the park plan will see up to $10 million more going on buying and demolishing a village for the elderly.

Similarly, the Auckland Regional Council's plan to develop a 1.5km tram circuit in the Wynyard Quarter at the cost of $7.4 million has the whiff of a pet project and the wish to leave a legacy.

Whatever the merits of the idea, and several caveats must be attached, it has surfaced very late. Just as the regional council is winding down.

It, therefore, faces an extremely tight timetable to fulfil its promoters' aim of being running by the time of next year's Rugby World Cup.

Among the duties of the Auckland Transition Agency, which is overseeing the merging of the local authorities into the Super City, is the approval of council contracts worth more than $20,000 that run past next June.

This power has been criticised by Auckland City's deputy mayor, David Hay, on the basis that it would slow councils' decision-making. So far, he has had little to worry about. There has been little evidence of the agency dictating to councils.

That must change. The council history will take two years to complete, so it falls inside the agency's orbit. It, and other examples of dubious spending of far greater quantum than anything attached to Mr Brown, must be nipped in the bud at this critical time.