As I noted in my post on the papers from Auckland Transport’s first board meeting, there was included a very basic eight month budget for what that organisation will be doing between now and June 30, 2011. Transport is the biggest item on the spending list for the Auckland Council – as the budget below shows that over $440 million of Auckland Council funding will be required for the activities undertaken by Auckland Transport between November 1 this year and 30 June next year. 
I’m always a bit more interested in the capital expenditure than the operating expenditure – because it relates to “building new stuff”. And what really stands out for me is the extraordinarily massive amount of money that Auckland Transport will be spending on new roads over the next eight months: around $316 million: over three times what it will spend on new public transport infrastructure.
As far as I can tell, that figure does not include maintaining existing roads, as that falls under operating expenditure (and spending around $80 million on roads maintenance seems reasonable). I would really be interested in seeing a breakdown in what that $316 million will be spend on over the next eight months – as remember Auckland Transport doesn’t fund state highway projects – so these will all be new or widened or upgraded local roads I suspect.
Perhaps it’s all fully justified. It just seems like a lot of money to be spending on new roads in the course of just eight months. Particularly when we’re scrounging around trying to find money for the CBD Rail Tunnel.
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Isn’t it only 50% of new local roads..? NZTA pays 50% too or so I thought..?
Yes theoretically only around $150 million of that would come from rates. Although it’s interesting to note that as a whole NZTA are only subsidising $255 million compared to the council having to pay $441 million.
I guess staff costs need to be fully funded by the council.
Ah, I thought it was $300,000,000 from us, matched by $300,000,000 from NZTA…
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the external revenue. I can think of only two sources for this- parking charges and fines, and public transport usage. Operating costs for parking are $25m. I wonder if this is fully covered by parking charges?
I would think parking charges cover themselves quite well, looking at the old ARTA monthly business reports the yearly income from PT was only about $30mil of which over $20mil was rail alone. This is because most of the bus revenue has traditionally gone to the bus operator as many bus routes like Dominion Rd are commercially run until they are changed to tendered contracts under the PTMA.
Maybe they are getting on with Penlink?
The $300mil will be made up of lots of small projects rather than just a couple of big ones. If you look at the old ARTA MBR’s you can see all of the applications send for NZTA approval. Of the big works one of them will be at New Lynn where they are now building the Clark St extension which involves another bridge across the rail trench, from memory that extension is at least $40mil alone (although some of that will be NZTA funding). The shared spaces in the CBD will also be part of that figure.
Exactly. I said it on the original post, we don’t know enough to be able to make any kind of informed opinion about how reasonable this is. We have a final figure, and that’s it.
It has to be remembered that AC has assumed all of the work that was previously done under the auspices of the seven local councils and ARC, and I’d love to know what their combined road capital works budgets were.
I have heard that a lot of these arterial upgrades are in Manukau. but don’t know details.
I once tried to find out actually what the councils were spending on roads versus PT. I failed because one council (Auckland City) wouldn’t give me a detailed breakdown. But, suffice it to say that it was pretty clear it was a lot more on roads than PT.
I also love the way that roads are seen as not costing anything once they’re built whereas Pt is “a money pit.” If you look at that you can see how much we are spending on road maintenance…hardly free!