Reflecting on the Auckland Transport CCO

I have tried to take a bit of a breather over the last week from blogging too much about the establishment of the Auckland Transport “council-controlled organisation” as part of the local government reorganisation happening in Auckland. The issue has remained fairly high-profile in the media, with Rod Oram in the Sunday Star-Times writing a particularly good article on the issue, and another article in the Herald today pointing out a complete lack of transport staff in the future Auckland Council.

I have written quite a few posts outlining the viewpoints of others, obviously with my own comments thrown in as well, about Auckland Transport, but I think it would be useful for me to go over the main problems I can see with the proposed structure, as well as what steps I think are necessary to fix the issues.

Problem 1 – the structure of the board of Auckland Transport

Section 45 of the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill sets out the structure of the governing body of Auckland Transport – its board. Essentially, it will have eight voting directors (of which two can be councillors on the Auckland Council) and one non-voting director appointed by NZTA. There are no non-voting directors from KiwiRail. Schedule 2 of that Act outlines in further detail the process by which the board is appointed. Perhaps the most controversial aspects revolve around the fact that it will be Steven Joyce and Rodney Hide appointing the initial board of Auckland Transport, and that the people they appoint will be around for up to three years, as detailed in Section 35I of the Bill. It’s also of some concern to various politicians that it will be the board itself, rather than Auckland Council, who will choose the chairperson of Auckland Transport. As it is the chair who often becomes the public voice of the agency, who that person is can be quite important.

So all up, I probably have three main issues with the structure of Auckland transport’s board:

1. That the initial board will be chosen by the Minister of Transport, rather than by current regional and local politicians.
2. That KiwiRail doesn’t have a non-voting director on the board, even though NZTA for some reason does.
3. That the board itself chooses its chair, rather than Auckland Council (less significant).

Solutions:

Being realistic, and assuming that an Auckland Transport CCO is going to happen, it would still be possible to fix these issues. Firstly, the initial board of Auckland Transport should be chosen by some sort of forum, the is comprised of representative of the various existing councils throughout Auckland. If that’s not possible, then it should be spelled out more clearly in the legislation that Auckland Council can replace part of, or all of, the transitional board at any time it wants. Alternatives, all the transitional directors could end their term 6 months into the Super City, to be replaced by a new board appointed by the Council.

In terms of the other two matters, they’re fairly easily fixed. KiwiRail must have a non-voting representative on the board to ensure integration between transport decisions made by Auckland Transport and the rail system operated by KiwiRail. Similarly, spelling out that Auckland Council should choose the chair of Auckland Transport is a pretty easy change to make.

Problem 2 – the Auckland Council’s oversight of Auckland Transport:

When I first started analysing the establishment of Auckland Transport I was surprised by the great lengths to which it seemed the legislation goes to ensure minimal oversight of this CCO by the Auckland Council. For some reason, Auckland Transport is exempt from a variety of sections of the Local Government Act (sections 59, 60, 64 and 74  to be exact), meaning that it only “may” act in accordance with its statement of intent or “may” act in accordance with the wishes of its shareholder, the Auckland Council. Surely the words “must” are required here?

Solutions:

Practically, the fixes required here are fairly complex, as they involve a detailed web of how different pieces of legislation apply. In general though, it is my strong opinion that Auckland Council must be provided with the legislative backing to properly control what Auckland Transport does. Auckland Transport must be required to act in accordance with its statement of intent, the wishes of its shareholder, it must be subject to the same openness of information that Councils are – no meetings behind closed doors, agendas and minutes (along with appendices detailing the different papers presented) should have to be published so that people can scrutinise what this agency is actually doing, and the decisions they are making.

In other words, section 59 (which requires CCOs to achieve the objective of their shareholder and act sustainably), section 60 (which requires CCOs to act in accordance with their statements of intent), section 64 (which further requires the CCO to act in accordance with its SOI) and section 74 (which requires CCOs to operate in an open manner as if they were councils) of the Local Government Act 2002 must apply to Auckland Transport.

Problem 3 – whether the Mayor and Council can achieve their transport goals:

It is highly likely that transport will be a huge election issue later this year. In terms of local and regional politics, transport is pretty well up there as the number one problem faced by Auckland. While I have confidence that most, if not all, local and regional politicians understand the need for Auckland to change its thinking on transport – away from building more motorways and towards improving public transport – there will be arguments over prioritising projects, whether a railway to the North Shore should happen before a railway to Howick and Botany; whether rail to the airport is more important than improving bus lanes… and so forth. There will also be debate about projects like PenLink, further bridges across the Whau River in west Auckland and so on.

With so much focus likely to be on transport, it would seem utterly crazy for those elected to have little power to actually implement their transport policies. While my suggested changes to the legislation outlined above would certainly help give the Council stronger control over Auckland Transport, I do wonder whether anything else could be done to ensure the future Mayor and Council are able to do transport.

Solutions:

This one is a tricky one. Short of canning Auckland Transport CCO altogether (which I’m not necessarily opposed to!), perhaps options such as giving the Mayor a dedicated seat on the board of Auckland Transport may help, or requiring in legislation more clear lines of control from the Mayor and Council, through to Auckland Transport.

Problem 4 – the sadly ignored Local boards

The local boards barely get a mention in terms of how they will influence what Auckland Transport does. In fact, from my reading, the term “Local Board” is not mentioned once in the section of the Auckland Law Reform Bill which relates to Auckland Transport. This just further confirms the suspicion I have that the Local Boards are nothing but glorified lobby groups and will be effectively powerless in the new Super City structure.

Solutions:

There would seem to be to be two paths that one could go down here to give the Local boards much more of a say in what Auckland Transport does. The first option would be to require Auckland Transport to develop a “Local Transport Plan” in conjunction with each and every local board throughout Auckland. Each Local Transport Plan would highlight important objectives, policies, projects, timeframes and so forth for transport improvements in that particular part of the city. While you would end up with 20 odd transport plans, and there would be a need for them to be consistent with overall region-wide transport strategies, getting local input into transport would allow much better integration with land-use planning than I suspect will happen otherwise.

The other option would be a tad more radical, and effectively require joint control of local roads between Auckland Transport and the relevant Local Board. The Royal Commission into reorganising local government in Auckland actually proposed that local roads should be in the hands of local councils, rather than the “Regional Transport Agency” they came up with.

Problem 5 – integrating land-use planning and transport planning

In some ways I find this problem the most difficult to solve without doing away with the Auckland Transport CCO altogether. As I’ve explained previously, I strongly believe that separately land-use planning (which will be done by Auckland Council) from transportation planning (done by Auckland Transport) is a really really bad idea. I don’t actually think it’s possible to do land-use planning without strongly focusing on transport, and at the same time I think it’s utterly stupid to try and do transport planning without having an eye to the land-use outcomes that exist, and the land-use outcomes you want to promote. Many of Auckland’s problems have occurred because of not enough integration between these two issues – and the proposed structure is only going to make things worse.

Solutions:

As I have said before, it is really difficult to see how this could be solved without doing away with Auckland Transport altogether. I think that the “Spatial Plan” section of the Auckland Law Reform Bill is supposed to help address this issue – but it has some significant flaws. To start with, the Spatial Plan is very high-level and strategic, whereas integration between land-use planning and transport is also needed “at the coalface” when making operational decisions (such as “should this resource consent be granted? Are its effects on traffic OK?”) or when making day-to-day policy decisions. Secondly, the Spatial Plan sits in isolation at the moment, with no other plans required to “give effect to it”. This is likely to change in the longer term, but for now it sits in isolation. Finally, the Spatial Plan doesn’t exist at the moment, and may yet take a very long time to exist.

Possibly one way of solving this problem is by ensuring that there remains a reasonably decent presence of transport within Auckland Council. There should be a fair number of strategic transport policy makers within Auckland Council, there should be some operational staff to give advice on consenting, planning and other matters, and there should be an expectation that Council still does transport stuff – just less than it did before. I’m not quite sure how this should be spelled out in the legislation, but I suggest that the clause which states that Council can only do transport if Auckland Transport lets them would need adjusting.

Conclusions:

Overall it would seem as though perhaps Auckland Transport CCO can be rescued from being rubbish, without doing away with it altogether. I wonder if any/many of these changes will end up happening.

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