There are a lot of plans being talked about at the moment, none more so than the “Auckland Spatial Plan”, which is due to be launched later today. But another plan, that has so far very much flown ‘under the radar’, is the 2011/2012 draft annual plan – which is open for consultation until April 1st. While the Draft Annual Plan is in many respects not quite as exciting as the Spatial Plan, it is very much intricately connected to the nuts and bolts of what’s going to happen over the next year – in terms of where Auckland Council spends its money. If Council is to spend money on something, it generally needs to be in the Annual Plan.
Of course, my interest in the Annual Plan relates to transport matters most particular. Transport costs a lot of money, and as previous blog posts have indicated, Auckland Council is certainly planning to spend a lot of money on transport in the 2011/2012 Draft Annual Plan. Reading through the Draft Annual Plan is a bit of a mission in itself: the main “region-wide” volume runs to nearly 300 pages while there are also fairly chunky volumes for each of the 21 local board areas. Transport gets picked up at around page 160 of the region-wide volume. As noted above, the council plans to spend a pretty big amount of money on transport over the next year:
So $336 million of operating spending and $368 million of capital spending in the 2011/2012 financial year is going to be spent on transport by the Auckland Council. While a lot of that will be funded from rates, financial contributions and asset sales (weirdly?), around $310 million will be borrowed by the council over the next year to help pay for new transport infrastructure.
OK, so that’s around $704 million the council will be spending on transport in the next year. Add to that the $452 million that Auckland Transport will get from NZTA and parking revenues for operating expenditure, and the $253 million that Auckland Transport will get from NZTA for capital expenditure, and we have quite a lot of money. Around $1.4 billion by my calculations – or roughly $1000 per Aucklander.
Of this money, obviously a lot will go on mundane things like road maintenance and repairs, as well as things like public transport subsidies. One would imagine that these things, plus keeping the 1000 or more staff at Auckland Transport in a job, largely eats up the operating expenditure. So if we’re talking about the “what new stuff is going to get built”, it would seem that Auckland Transport will have around $621 million to spend in the 2011/2012 financial year on transport capital expenditure. Once again, quite a lot of money.
So, where’s the money going? Unfortunately, the Draft Annual Plan isn’t too clear about this. What we do see is a list of major projects – some with costs:
It’s interesting to note that most of the projects listed above have a strong public transport component: either partly of fully being PT projects. In terms of costs though, I only see two projects with actual figures for the 2011/2012 financial year: $12.2 million to be spent on AMETI and $40.9 million to be spent on the New Lynn TOD. But that’s only $53 million out of a total capital expenditure programme of $621 million. Where on earth is the other half billion going?
Page 170 gives us a little bit more detail on where the transport money will be going (at least Auckland Council’s share of it). The results are pretty disturbing:
If we look at the breakdown of capital expenditure we see the following:
- Parking and enforcement: $20.98 million
- Public Transport: $25.93 million
- Road Network: $307.62 million
- Transport Planning: $8.50 million
- Travel Behaviour Change: $5.32 million
Perhaps to reinforce the imbalance, let’s look at the data graphed:
Seriously, what the heck is the council doing? It was elected, particularly the Mayor, on a platform of significantly improving Auckland’s public transport system. The Mayor has talked over and over again about the need to create a world-class public transport system for Auckland. Reading through the “major projects” listed above you’d swear that most of the money was going into public transport, but once again when you take the time to look at the figures it would seem the actual numbers tell a completely different story.
Now there may be an explanation to all of this. Some of the projects that truly benefit public transport – like Dominion Road upgrades and the like – could be included within the “Road Network” budgets when in actual fact they probably should be under “Public Transport”. In which case there should be far more information on what projects actually sit under the broad categories of “road network”, “public transport” and so forth.
At best, the transport section of the Draft Annual Plan is completely incompetent: by not providing information on which projects fall under which categories and by misplacing projects that actually benefit public transport under the broad category of “road network”. At worst, this is a devious and deliberately misleading Draft Annual Plan: designed to make us think that the great focus is on public transport by including a whole pile of PT projects in the nice words at the start; whereas in actual fact the real numbers behind the scenes show Auckland Council and Auckland Transport to be just as bad as their NZTA and Central Government counterparts when it comes to spending vast amounts of money on more roads.
Fortunately, this Annual Plan has not been finalised yet and there is the opportunity to make a submission and point out the madness and hypocrisy of the Plan in its current form. You can make an online submission here and eventually you will have the opportunity to have your submission heard in person. I will put together a “model submission” in the next few days and post it up here to make the process even easier.
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As I’ve said before, you don’t know what the money’s being spent on but you do conveniently ignore the fact that AT has inherited committed capital projects from seven councils before leaping to a conclusion.
If we see a graph that looks like this in two years’ time, I’ll be very concerned. Right now, though, AT is still muddling along under the weight of all the work that the previous councils had in play at the time Megatropolis came into being.
A number of people I work with are doing work with AT at present, and several have said that people are still figuring out their jobs. What I’ve heard does not describe to me an environment that’s sufficiently cohesive to have come up with nine figures of new capital spending, or even close to it, but rather one that’s still dwarfed by legacy crap that came from the last landlords. They’ve not even been in the job for six months, for crying out loud!
This is excellent analysis Jarbury — thanks for all the work you put into this blog!
We definitely need to put the pressure on the politicians to make fundamental changes to the capital expenditure. They will never acheive their vision if they don’t fundamentally change the traffic engineering practices that have created the car-oriented sprawl we see in Auckland. This is officials just carrying over individual spending programmes from the 7 former councils, most likely. I myself am extremely worried that if they don’t fundamentally change their approach to parking, minimum parking requirements will be left in and they will completely undermine the goal of a compact eco city with affordable houseing and good pt…
World Class Lip Service more like it.
Roads ROADS Roads RoAdS rOaDs Roads ROADS Roads RoAdS rOaDs
Matt,
The new Council is under no obligation to continue funding previous city or district council projects (unless contracts have already been signed).
You’re right, they’re not. But we have no visibility of what was legally obligated at the time Megatropolis arose, which is my point. Seven road-building TLAs can commit to a hell of a lot of capital works, and AT has to fulfil all the signed contracts. Some of the contracts will be for multi-year periods, and are just as valid as ones that last for a month.
Show me the aggregate annual capital expenditure on roads by the old councils before trying to tell me that AT is a roads-fest of the same scale as Steven Joyce and Bill English. Because right now, I have a single data point that tells me diddly squat about the bigger picture.
This work programme would have been produced by Auckland Transport. The new Auckland Transport structure shed all previous busway planning, bus priority planning, bus lane planning and bus stop planning jobs, unless specifically tied to CBD, Dominion Road, New Lynn or AMETI. Attention was repeatedly drawn to this during the transition process but they were never put back in. Cycling planners were put back in after being initially targeted for mass redundancy, perhaps due to protest from very well organised lobby groups in this area, but not planners for buses. In other words, if you lived in general suburbia and not next to a railway station, plans for your future long distance commuting would be based on roads (e.g., Te Atatu). So it’s perhaps no surprising that the post-redundancy remainder looks like Roads(repeat n times). Not sure if Len’s focused on that level of detail.
He should be! As they say the “devil is always in the detail” and this is the sort of thing that will come back to haunt him.
Of course there is no PT component to the current New Lynn TOD; that’s all about the Clark Street overbridge and the re-jigging of the current road configuration. Actually, the PT component of the New Lynn TOD is and always has been remarkably slight; a classic instance of PT-wash if you will. What we’ve been given is a pretty train station pretty much lost in the middle of some quite horrendous roads. And as a regular pedestrian in the area I can assure you that the wait time at the lights is seriously lengthy, so lengthy that school kids (understandably) don’t even bother to use the designated crossings when exiting the station. It’s a car-focussed solution and, as far as I’ve experienced, has led to a significant downgrading of local amenities such as the shops, library, etc; oddly enough, not the mall though.