Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown. Photo / Michael Craig
OPINION
All organisations, public and private, get more bureaucratic as they grow in size, but the successful few regularly prune to keep their focus and their costs and management layers under control.
Recent revelations over Auckland Council’s eye-watering bills for lawyers and accountants are only symptomatic of widespread uncontrolled spending by councils and government, especially, who have blown $350m on consultant spend for big projects in Auckland like the Waitematā Crossing and Light Rail studies.
Studies we don’t even want and won’t be needing for a long time while huge unfinished projects like City Rail Link (CRL) are nowhere near completion and absolutely necessary additions like separating road and rail crossings remain unfunded and yet to be started. Without these, the CRL simply won’t generate the passengers needed to make it worthwhile.
The big legal bills are mostly to cover defending water tightness claims simply because Auckland Council is the last man standing and the government refuses to legislate to limit this risk.
Indeed government interference is so great that the Auckland Council can’t even set parking fines which remain so low that increasing parking charges is a waste of time when the penalties are less than the charges.
Cost overruns are everywhere and seem almost to be accepted by boards who lack the ability to seriously question these or even to do division.
Auckland Transport recently announced it had done 300 raised pedestrian crossings for $89m and nobody raised any concerns.
I am.
If you divide $89m by 300 you get the outrageous cost per pedestrian crossing of $300,000 each. You can build a house for this. It has to stop.
The justification for this was that it had saved 57 lives. How do they know? Who are these people saved? I’d like to meet them.
Maybe they need counselling or possibly they just don’t exist and it is a convenient way of justifying this ludicrous expense at a time we don’t seem to have the money to fill potholes.
Don’t get me started on potholes.
The ridiculous definition of safety means Waka Kotahi (the old roads board) has heaps for wire ropes and safety fences but nothing for the main safety feature; being the road surface. This needs to change, and now.
The recently opened SH1 motorway extension from Puhoi to Warkworth is welcome but a quick drive-through shows it could have been done for at least $400m less, thereby allowing enough money to tackle the dreadful road between Warkworth and Wellsford.
The new SH1 motorway is generally about 10m wider than it is between Albany and Silverdale, a section that carries way more traffic. How do they justify higher standards as you get further from Auckland and the number of vehicles using it drops? The answer is, nobody with any knowledge of road construction exists on the Waka Kotahi boards who approve this nonsense.
All council and government bodies need to have a sniff test mechanism so that expenditure meets the public enquiry test of “is this justified?”
A recent council meeting heard staff quote a report, from one of the dreadful big four accounting firms, offering choices of further options for a large retirement village.
Sheepishly, council staff admitted to coughing up $90,000 for what anyone else would have got from a couple of beers with a competent real estate agent.
This has to stop and the exposure of this means it will.
Elected and appointed officials need to seriously question all costs presented to them and also the unjustifiable layers of management.
They need to run checks of what is offered with what is delivered at street level.
It is often shocking but the more waste that is exposed the better the chance of stopping this drain on ratepayers and taxpayers.
- Wayne Brown is the Mayor of Auckland.