Transport CCO: more accountable, but still secretive?

Today the select committee on the Local Government (Auckland Law Reform) Bill, more commonly known as “the third Super City bill”, reported back to parliament with suggested alterations to the legislation that have arisen from the 800 odd submissions that were made on the bill. Of most interest to this blog is that this bill creates a council controlled organisation – known simply as “Auckland Transport” – that will control all transport activities within Auckland, except for state highways and railways (and airports and ports of course).

I have made numerous posts on Auckland Transport over the past few months, outlining my concerns with how the agency was being established, and in particular on matters relating to how it would be accountable and transparent, the structure and appointment process of its board, and fundamentally whether or not it was a good idea to separate off transport from the other functions undertaken by council. Perhaps the most useful blog post that outlines my concerns is entitled “Reflecting on the Auckland Transport CCO” – as it summarises the matters that I felt needed to be addressed by the select committee. It’s interesting to have a look and see what has, and has not, been changed. Simply put, the areas of concern that I had were:

1. The structure of the board of Auckland Transport. In particular:
   • That the initial board will be chosen by the Minister of Transport, rather than by current regional and local politicians
   • That KiwiRail doesn’t have a non-voting director on the board, even though NZTA for some reason does.
   • That the board itself chooses its chair, rather than Auckland Council
2. The Auckland Council’s oversight of Auckland Transport (or lack thereof). This mainly arose out of parts of the bill that said Auckland Transport did not have to act in accordance with various sections of the Local Government Act 2002 that related to ensuring it was accountable. A large part of this concern also related to the ability of Auckland Transport to hold its meetings in secret.
3. Whether the Mayor and Council can achieve their transport goals. This was very much related to the previous issue, and is based around the fact that transport is a huge issue in Auckland that politicians will campaign on – but may not be able to actually do anything about.
4. The Local Boards and Auckland Transport. My concern that the wishes and desires of the Local Boards could be completely ignored by Auckland Transport.
5. Integrating land-use planning and transport planning. In some ways this was my most fundamental concern with Auckland Transport, that by simply having a CCO for transport matters, rather than having it rolled into council, we would see further separation of land-use and transport planning, when what we actually need is better integration.

The select committee report is a whopping 380 pages long, and is certainly fairly dense reading – and not altogether easy to dig through and find the important bits that you’re after, but I have had a reasonable crack at seeing how (or if) my concerns outlined above have been addressed. The results are quite interesting.

If we look first at the membership of the board of Auckland Transport, it would appear as though some changes have been made generally to the way directors on the board of CCOs are appointed. This is outlined below: In english, what this actually means is that although the government will continue to appoint the directors of the CCOs (I think both Steven Joyce and Rodney Hide will appoint Auckland Transport’s directors) it will be made clear that the Council can sack those directors at any time. Furthermore, not all the director seats will be appointed until the council is in existence. It will be the council itself that appoints the chair and deputy chair of Auckland Transport’s board, rather than the board itself. I think that’s quite an important change. However, in terms of my other concerns, we still don’t see any KiwiRail director on the board.

Overall, I think the changes to the board structure are pretty good and generally most of my concerns have been taken into account. I think it’s very important that there has been clarification to ensure that the council can sack any board members whenever they please. I can imagine most council candidates promoting that from day one.

Turning to the second matter of concern that I had, of accountability and transparency, this is the area where I had the most hope of change from the select committee report. Some changes have been made that make a big difference here – most notably the removal of “Clause 38(3)” in the bill, which doesn’t look like much, but had some huge consequences: The section that has been crossed out effectively enabled Auckland Transport to not have to act in accordance with the wishes of Auckland Council, to not have to act in accordance with its statement of intent, to not have to be a good employer, to not have to act in a responsible manner and to not have to hold its meeting in public. Whilst I’m damn well relieved that this section has been deleted, I’m pretty shocked it was ever put there in the first place. Pretty damn right cheeky if you ask me.

However, there’s a little catch here, as it relates to section 74 of the Local Government Act (the part which effectively requires the CCO to hold their meetings in public and publish their agenda and minutes). And this can be found a couple of pages on (page 136 of the select committee report): My understanding of this section of the bill is that actually the only meetings that will be open to the public, and the only agendas and minutes that will be published by Auckland Transport, are those which relate to bylaws – a fairly small minority of decisions that Auckland Transport will make. So I very much remain unconvinced that this CCO will be transparent to the public, and that is a huge concern. For a start, it will severely limit the amount of information that’s available to me for the writing of blog posts.

So overall, in terms of accountability and transparency, we have certainly seen an improvement in the accountability of the agency. In short, it will have to do what Auckland Council want it to do – and that is a very good thing. However, I don’t think that the transparency concerns have been addressed. It would appear as though Auckland Transport will still be a secret agency – and that’s not good enough.

Turning to the issue of whether the mayor and council will able to achieve their goals, that has certainly been enhanced by the changes made that relate to accountability. The ability of the council to dismiss board members appointed by central government at any stage is also a step in the right direction in that respect. Of course there are still issues relating to the question of how much influence the council will really have over what Auckland Transport does, but short of getting rid of the CCO (which was never going to happen) I think that this issue has been at least somewhat addressed.

On the issue of local board, and what influence they will have over what Auckland Transport does, that’s probably the trickiest issue to understand. To be quite honest I don’t think anyone knows exactly how the local boards will interact with the council, let alone the Transport CCO. It will be interesting to see how these details sort themselves out. I don’t have particularly much faith that the local boards will end up having much, if any, influence over what Auckland Transport does.

Which leaves us with the fundamental issue of integrating land-use planning (which is what the council will do) with transport planning (what Auckland Transport will do). As I stated in my previous post, I really can’t see how this issue can be resolved without getting rid of the Transport CCO model altogether, and instead including transport within Auckland Council. As this obviously hasn’t happened, my concerns still remain. However, the “purpose” of Auckland Transport has been broadened somewhat, in a way that links it to outcomes that stretch beyond simply transport matters. This is outlined below:

While I don’t think that this will actually fix my concerns about a lack of integration between planning and transport, the fact that Auckland Transport’s specific purpose is to create a transport system that contributes to a better city is a damn good thing. Hopefully this will make it clear that Auckland Transport can’t ignore land-use planning outcomes.

So overall, the changes made to this bill have certainly improved it. The accountability of Auckland Transport has been improved significantly, the changes made to the board structure mean that the council will have more control over Auckland Transport than it had before, and the changes to the wording of Auckland Transport’s purpose should mean that we see a slight improvement in the integration of transport and land-use planning. However, my understanding of the bill is that Auckland Transport will still operate largely in secret, that the local boards will still have limited control over what Auckland Transport does and that fundamentally it will still be difficult to integrate land-use and transport planning. So while things definitely aren’t as bad as they were, I still have some pretty big concerns with the way Auckland Transport is being created.

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