'Planners seem to forget about the residents'

Community activist Keith Sharp. Picture / Glenn Jeffrey

When it comes to achieving denser populations in parts of Auckland, Keith Sharp of Panmure reckons planners tend to overlook an important fact.

"They forget," he says, "that there are already people living here."

Life has not been loads of laughs lately for people living round the eastern suburban town centre. Dense development plans in the area have been rumbling around for about five years, a sort of pilot for similar ideas contemplated elsewhere.

Mr Sharp, spokesman for the Panmure Community Action Group, is a journalist with a steady, matter of fact approach. His views are typical of the people living near the now struggling shopping centre. Since he arrived in the area aged 12 he has lived in the area for most of the last 33 years, 19 years on the trot this latest time. He knows the area intimately, as do many in the 200 households involved with the group.

Mr Sharp went to Tamaki College, played soccer for Mt Wellington and remembers when Panmure was a thriving little centre with major department stores watched over by a protective, solid Labour, Mt Wellington Borough Council. The Panmure group includes the sort of people who were able to point out errors in the Auckland City's list of former horticultural sites in the suburb. And they know why they like the area.

Mr Sharp says a pilot project for Panmure came out about 2000 and things developed from there.

Basically, he says, Auckland City wanted re-zoning of most of residential Panmure to allow four, five, even six-storey apartments. It came as a shock because it had never been signalled.

It sticks in his memory that at an early meeting in a packed hall there was an overwhelming feeling of genuine anger from the locals.

"The feeling of the people of Panmure right from the beginning was that the planners had made all the plans in advance," he says. "Then there was a cursory, shallow, consultation process. They seemed to be merely looking for the answers they wanted to hear."

He says the local community dug in its heels.

What followed was a long, exhaustive process of attending meetings and consultation. Sharp and others have become watchfully familiar with things like council meetings and decisions, district plans, growth strategies, the regional policy statement and strange acts like the Local Government (Auckland) Amendment Act 2004, probably still unknown to many Aucklanders.

The final result of all the talking was that the locals and the city council agreed that new housing development in a block between Pilkington Rd and Jellicoe Rd between Panmure town and Tamaki rail station would have a two-storey, eight-metre height limit, not the three-storey, 11m limit proposed to be allowed in the residential 8 zone.

The council in its decision on the plan change on March 31 noted the lesser height reflected what the community believed to be "necessary for their social economic and cultural well-being".

Mr Sharp says the two storeys fitted in with the surrounding area and also protected views of Mt Wellington from that part of Panmure [which includes Pleasant View Rd].

Now the Auckland Regional Council, clearly intent on protecting its proposed intensive housing ambitions, is appealing for the higher limit to the Environment Court. Mr Sharp calls it "a slap in the face", a message that the regional council will not accept any special agreements between communities and their councils.

He says the Panmure group can't afford to challenge the ratepayer-funded ARC and only hopes Auckland City will prevail. Yesterday the regional council chairman Mike Lee called for an overhauling of the dense growth strategy. But the changes and densities planned for 51 areas in the region are already embedded in proposed district plan and the regional policy statement changes, now moving towards becoming firm rules.

Mr Sharp has his own view of it all: "Over the last five years trust in local government has been severely dented," he says.

How many others will come to have cause to agree with him?