Auckland Transport’s draft SOI

When it became clear that the establishment of the Auckland Super City would involve the divesting of around 75% of the council’s business into standalone “council controlled organisations” (CCOs), the big question became  to what extent the council would really control those organisations. A key mechanism in ensuring there’s a strong link between the council and the CCOs are the various statements of intent (SOIs) that each CCO will be required to operate under – and which has to be agreed upon by the council.

In short, the SOI for a CCO like Auckland Transport is going to be pretty important in determining what they get up to, what the expectations are for improvements over the next year, what targets might be in terms of public transport patronage, reduced congestion or whatever other measures are used to determine how well Auckland Transport is doing its job.

The Council’s “CCO Strategy & Appointments Committee” has been looking at the draft SOIs that each of the CCOs has put forward to them, with council staff commenting on various ways they may be improved. This has all pretty much flown under the radar so far. But I’ve had a dig through the agenda items of that Council committee and plucked out the draft SOI for Auckland Transport. It actually makes for very interesting reading – and the interesting stuff (which excludes the accounting details) only runs to around 16 pages.

The introduction confirms that the point of this particular SOI is to simply cover what Auckland Transport gets up to over the next 8 months. This seems to have been largely set by the Auckland Transition Agency and is a series of legacy projects from ARTA and the old councils: Section 4 of the Draft SOI outlines what Auckland Transport considers its key goals to be:

I particularly like the mention of ‘reducing car dependency’ and ‘enabling Aucklanders to make smarter transport choices’. This hopefully means that Auckland Transport realise their job is not to continue “business as usual”, but rather contribute to Auckland’s transport system being much more balanced and providing a wider range of realistic transport options than it has in the past.

In the short-term, Auckland Transport suggests that it focuses on the following matters: It’s good that Auckland Transport sees itself as having a key role in the “Auckland Plan”, which is otherwise known as the “spatial plan”. My greatest hope for that plan is for it to finally deliver some level of true integration between land-use and transport outcomes.

The Draft SOI then starts delving a bit deeper into the specifics of various projects. These give us some idea about the breakdown of what Auckland Transport will be spending around $440 million of Council money on between now and June next year. A pretty interesting list. Unfortunately, the vagueness of the description of the roading projects in particular means that it’s difficult to work out exactly where the $300 million on new roads will be spent over the next eight months: aside from it being fairly obvious that such expenditure appears largely focused in New Lynn and areas of new development like Flat Bush & Pukekohe.

The remainder of the document has some good information detailing how Auckland Transport intends to work with other agencies. The wording is all good – that there should be no surprises and that they should all work collaboratively. I guess time will tell as to whether that’s the reality or not.

The minutes of the Council committee meeting that discussed the SOIs are quite interesting – as it appears the council wants them to be modified in ways that increase their level of specificity and to ensure they align with the (as yet non-existent) Auckland spatial plan.

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