An early draft of the 2011/2012 Annual Plan was discussed at last week’s meeting of the Strategy and Finance Committee of Auckland Council. A lot of media focus has gone into the $3.4 million allocated (or maybe not) to the Maori Statutory Board – an interesting debate but not one that’s particularly relevant to this blog. What’s of more interest to me is the proposed spending on transport – which of course is Auckland Council’s main tool for ensuring Auckland Transport does what the council wants: after all, Auckland Transport has very limited ability to raise funding on its own.
Transport is the single biggest spending item in the council’s budget. This shows up pretty clearly in a breakdown of what Auckland Council’s capital spending programme looks like for 2011/2012:
If we look down the draft Annual Plan a bit, we can an idea about where this money is going to come from:
As you can see, there is no income from transport-related activities. After all, our petrol taxes go to NZTA and I think parking revenue goes directly to Auckland Transport. So most of our spending on transport will come from rates or from borrowing – a pretty high amount of borrowing to fund CCOs by the looks of the pie-chart above.
If you zip down to page 142 of the Draft Annual Plan, you can see more information on transport matters. This gives a bit more information on the key transport projects and priorities for the 2011/2012 year: pretty much stuff that we’ve seen before in Auckland Transport’s statement of intent.
Working our way further down the plan again (to page 150 now), we can see a further breakdown of operating and capital expenditure on transport throughout the 2011/2012 year. Let’s start with Opex:
Some interesting information here. We see that Auckland Council will be spending nearly $150 million in the 2011/2012 year on subsidising public transport. While I’m certainly not one to criticise spending on public transport, that is a large amount of money and we should be ensuring that the spending is good value for money. That means eliminating duplicative services, making public transport routes simpler, finding a way to operate rail that doesn’t require ten million Veolia staff members and so forth. We also see around $89 million of operating expenditure on roads – I’m presuming that this is largely things like resealing roads, rebuilding footpaths and other ‘maintenance and repair’ stuff. I’m not quite sure how we’re going to manage to spend $84 million on transport planning – but my feeling is that that’s an incredibly broad measure that probably helps pay for the salaries of all the staff at Auckland Transport. So it’s probably necessary – it would just be nice to see a bit more of a breakdown of the cost.
The final interesting thing about capital expenditure is the increase in $13 million on public transport subsidies. I wonder if that’s in response to the mysterious rail funding gap.
Now if we turn to capital expenditure, things get a bit weirder – let’s have a look at the breakdown in expenditure over the 2011/2012 year:
These numbers raise some interesting questions. Firstly, what on earth are we spending $20 million of capital funding of parking and enforcement on? I certainly hope that doesn’t include buying and building big new carparks all over the place. But certainly the biggest question of this whole Annual Plan is what on earth are we spending $307 million of capital road network funding on? That is an extraordinarily large amount of money with absolutely no detail describing what it’s going to be spent on. One can only assume from reading the key projects and priorities above that we’ll see some going on the New Lynn roading projects, some going into Dominion Road upgrade and some going into AMETI – but those are multi-year projects that I thought (apart from New Lynn which is well advanced) probably wouldn’t have their major spending years until a bit later on.
So where’s the money going? Auckland Council’s spending over $300 million next year on new roads and we have no idea of the details. That seems really weird.
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Hey. For me the biggest gap here is the 0% capital expenditure on environmental management (although I can’t see their overall opex). Still, given that 44% is going to transport, and that transport is the biggest polluter of the lot, you’d think that they could spare even 1% for putting in structures to mitigate the damage!
Probably a black budget in case NZTA don’t stump up for everything they have been asked for. Example: Penny Webster is determined that Warkworth will have not just the new motorway (paid for by NZTA) but also some sort of Warkworth bypass as well as the previously planned Western Collector. She wants NZTA to stump up for the cost of the bypass which she wants to have built NOW. Question: where is a bypass going to go and who will pay for it? I think NZTA’s position is that Warkworth will get one road instead of 3 (after all, they can’t all exit just north of Warkworth – what a stupid mess that would be). NZTA quite rightly would consider the Western Collector to be NOT a state road, the bypass probably is but the question is where will that go? So, to keep faith with the people that put her into her position, she will need to somehow fund at least either a bypass or a Western Collector – especially as she wants something done NOW rather than having to wait another 10 years.
My question would be: what define PT funding and what defines new roads, i.e. does building a buslane count as PT spending or as spending on roads. How much of AMETI gets put down as PT spending and how much as road building.
Yes indeed RTC, that’s why I really want to see a ‘project by project’ breakdown of the spending. Much of the earlier parts of AMETI, and the Dominion Road project, will largely have PT benefits – if they form the bulk of the road capital expenditure then that’s great.
It’d be nice to know though. I worry much of the $300 million will be spent on building wide roads out in Flat Bush.
Well if Auckland Council really has $300+ million a year for capital works on transport, we can bloody well afford to build our own rail extensions!
Aren’t they working on some big regional arterials out in Manukau/ South East Auckland? I remember hearing vague rumours of several major roading extensions but they may be motorways actually and thus paid for by NZTA. Anybody know?
That would be AMETI Lucy. The project was initially just a scaled back version of the Eastern Motorway, minus the section across Hobsons Bay. The scope has shifted a bit over the last few years to include some reasonable bus provision, but it is still basically a major highway project.
In addition to a short section of busway through Panmure, the key components of AMETI are: widening Ti Rakau Drive; building a large flyover at the intersection of Ti Rakau and the Pakauranga Highway; duplicating the bridge over the Tamaki River; grade separating the Waipuna Rd intersection and building a new multi lane limited-access Rd between Waipuna Rd and Glen Innes (in the Eastern Motorway reserve). If you add these all together it becomes apparent the project is about building a new expressway from Botany to Glen Innes to near-motorway standard.
Once this is all done I think it is safe to assume they will ‘naturally’ move on to completing the ‘missing link’ between Glen Innes and Grafton Gully. After all, we can’t have six lanes of expressway ending on a two lane road in a local shopping centre, especially not if there is a nice big motorway reservation right in front of it!
They should really revisit the strategic goals of this project. Like Admin says the first bits look to be quite worthwhile, some busway type lanes, sorting out the Panmure roundabout etc. But after that, does the Auckland Council really want to start steamrolling a pseudo-motorway through the eastern suburbs? Perhaps it is time for STEM to come out of hibernation and nip this in the bud!
What is ‘Transport Planning’? $84 mill sounds an awful lot for a few consultants to plan some new roads.
I think Lucy might be meaning Mill Road south from Redoubt Road towards Papakura
What I’d like to know is how much of the $29m is for the Auckland Integrated Fare Scheme, how much has been spent on AIFS so far and how much more will need to be spent? Also how much was spent to vary the contract to allow Snapper to become part of AIFS? I also note that the latest Infratil update now says that Snapper will be rolled out from April, so it looks like it has already slipped a month based on what was said at the press conference before Christmas.
$26m PT budget I mean
In the report it states cuts in the budget are yet to be made.
What’s the $74 million additional development of the New Lynn Transport Centre involve? I thought it was finished?
I think the main remaining bit is the Clark Street extension, with its “flyover” over the railway line to connect with Great North Road and take all the traffic off Totara Ave.
The transport centre was only stage 1 of 3, as admin said, stage 2 is the Clark St extension to bypass New Lynn town centre then with the traffic gone from Totara Ave they then plan to turn that into a shared space between Gt North Rd and Clark St
I’m aware of the stage 2 and 3 projects in New Lynn, but those are not part of the transport centre, which the $74m is credited with.
@ Chris. Yes, that is the project I was htinking of. Thganks!
Apparently $85 million is going to Penlink. Not sure if that is happening next year but it’s definitely in there. hmmm, how shall we fix the $60 million shortfall in the budget? wait, I know! Let’s not build this roading project SO CRAZY that even NZTA refuses to fund it…