This is a guest post from Leroy Beckett of Generation Zero
Every three years Auckland Council consult on their plan for the next 10 years. It covers everything from the transport budget to targeted rates and goals for our environment.
That consultation is currently underway.
This year, the council are also asking for feedback on the Auckland Plan at the same time. That is the plan for the next 30 years! It is a lot more top level, focussing on ambitions and goals for all of the city.
We think the current the plan is remarkably unambitious, particularly in it’s goals for transport, housing, and the environment.
Our city is facing massive challenges in all those areas. We can not face our problems without bold ambitions. We can not accept a weak climate target. We can not accept people will keep dying preventable deaths on our roads. We can not accept an Auckland where not everyone has a home.
So we here at Gen Zero Auckland looked at that and decided to combine it all into one big quick submit. Our plan to #fixourcity.
We want the council to aspire for a city where everyone has a home, where public transport is sustainable and affordable, and to be zero carbon by 2050.
In 2015 we ran a hugely successful campaign on the last Long Term Plan that focussed on transport spending. Our Essential Budget prioritised the things Auckland needs. Thousands of you supported it and the plan that eventually passed looked most like ours. It was a huge win for Auckland.
Take 1 minute to submit of the future of your city.
This time we want to focus on more than the transport budget (while still having a lot to say about transport) and address what we see as a lack of vision for our city.
On fixour.city there a clear goals for each of our focus areas, and answers to three questions Auckland Council are asking around a petrol tax and targeted rates.
Your submissions will feed directly into the councils consultation and make a huge difference. We have heard that currently only half of submitters support the petrol tax.
That’s why we need you to take 1 minute to submit, and share with your friends.
Note submissions close Wednesday March 28, so be quick.
If you’re interested in finding out out more about the council plans, the full council documentation is available online here.
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What is a Harbour Levy and who is it targeted at? The others are all pretty self explanatory, I’m just left scratching my head about this one.
Clean water projects to stop overflows of sewerage and storm water into the harbour.
I get that bit. It’s the who it’s targeted at that I’m confused about; by ‘targeted’ do they mean ‘separate’ or ‘geographically targeted’?
I think they just mean the funding collected is hypothecated into speeding up the stormwater separation projects.
Fix our city? What like break it into four city councils and 3 district councils and get rid of AT, Panuku, ATEED and all the other useless organisations? I would vote for that if they ever gave us a referendum.
You couldn’t get rid of ATEED, mfwic. The poor little corporations need their help at our cost to get through the maze of Council regulations in order to do things that Council should be preventing for our security.
+1
Creating the super city was so bad for democracy. Concentrating more power into fewer hands, further away from normal people. Not to mention costing more than previousl. To be expected based on all similar occurrences in other countries. I was shocked that it was ACT that pushed it through when they claimed to be Libertarian.
I 100% agree that “having a say” should mean exactly that. We should have broken up the previous large councils, not made them into something even bigger. I’d like a vote on making the current local boards becoming independent local borough councils.
To me it is appalling that the super-city was imposed on us without consultation or a vote, unlike in Wellington where the locals saw what happened with amalgamation in Auckland and voted against it. It’s not too late to have a vote though, and probably the sooner the better.
In theory, transport planning should be much easier now, though. And planning for housing.
Yes, I would think so! We used to have the ARA looking after region-wide planning, including transport, water and parks. That’s probably a good model that would complement proper local government.
As much as I dislike the process that was used to create the Super City Council (amalgamation of the city and district councils) I’m actually for the idea. We’ve seen far more progress on transport improvements since 2010 than ever before.
Wonderful, bring back the good old days of 1989-2010, when as we all remember local government was transparent and progressive and not full of parochial patch-protection at all.
It’s like people don’t remember what it was like when KiwiRail had to deal with three different councils to double-track the rail bridge from Avondale to New Lynn.
So by that logic you would prefer a dictatorship then? Decisions can be made very quickly. There are pros and cons of decentralisation of power. It can be slow, but it works just fine in plenty of other places. There is no competition now, so there is zero incentive for council to improve how it conducts business.
I’m glad you’ve posted this quick submit tool here. I’d heard it was a goodie and tried to include it in an email being sent out to a community organisation, along with Forest and Bird’s, Bike Auckland’s and Eco Matters’ quick submit tools. I couldn’t find it googling, though, because it was only on facebook. I’ve sent it out now, but not in the main email.
I find the Auckland plan to be a whole lot of fluff. I’d like to see some proper measurable accountable targets in there. Even some of Gen Zero’s targets are not measurable until 2050!
It is so difficult for people to make submissions when no one knows about these things half the time. I’m more annoyed that council is moving to fortnightly rubbish collection and I never even heard about submissions to their waste management plan. There will be more rubbish bags dumped all over the place now, or just strewn about the street. People just end up dumping the rubbish in some park somewhere or just leaving it on the street. Poor people cant pay for larger bins and households are far larger some places generating more waste. My neighbor has 8 kids for goodness sake. One rubbish bin isnt enough, but they very likely can’t afford an extra bin.
So what’s your solution to the landfill legacy we’re leaving our kids? Genuinely interested here. The Waste MInimisation Plan submission doesn’t take long to fill out btw.
The problem is that the detail is so hidden no one would notice until this stuff is actually implemented. “but we gave you plenty of time to submit….” The WMMP is so full of waffle and fluff it is ridiculous.
I’m not paid to provide solutions, I’m just saying the facts.
I agree people should pay for rubbish. I agree with recycling as much as we can and composting where we can.But we still are going to have a whole lot of stuff going to landfill.
There should be a price. It is market forces at work, the way it should be. It shouldn’t be seen as free to dump as much as you would like.
The council approach is silly because there is no choice. All they are doing is saying “make less rubbish and here’s a bill”. It’s like if council only allowed 3 bedroom houses to be built and said “this one solution is all we have and you just have to deal with it. For most people it is fine. But some people with larger families are in the least position to pay and just dump rubbish.
Free inorganic is gone, so now people just dump on the streets and it sits for months. Illegal rubbish dumping is happening right now and I’ve given up calling council to clean it up. The cost of enforcement and clean up is probably more than the status quo. And they want to make it worse. We can’t even opt out and use a 3rd party rubbish collector who is cheaper.
The result is that I have to put up with looking at bags of rubbish all over the place because of poor council policy.
Thanks for that. I think there’s merit in the community recycling centres, and the programmes they have for learning how to live lightly and to compost are good.
What I’m most interested in seeing is how they’re going to tackle the 80% of waste which is from business… there are so many examples worldwide they could follow if they chose. How they got away with only focusing on domestic waste last time around is beyond me!
I don’t feel we’re doing all we can to reduce, reuse, recycle etc… and if we were, what is still left shouldn’t be being put in landfills. The Copenhagen solution – build a park and ski slope over an incineration facility in town, and have it blow puffs of emissions out in smoke rings of “exactly” one tonne of CO2 amounts so that people can visualise one tonne of CO2 – that’s being upfront. Burying it out of sight is not.
Wow, visualising the emissions is a really interesting idea.
Have you considered how regressive the various charges are, and how they will impact people on low incomes who are already in precarious situations? That needs to be addressed BEFORE they are put in place.
It would be extremely easy, and highly likely for the impact to be brushed aside from what I’ve seen of Greater Auckland so far. Show me I’m wrong.
Transport-related: Best way to address inequity at the same time might be to put the cost of truck damage to our roads onto the trucking companies. Then rates could be lowered and the better pricing mechanisms of (preferably both) a fuel tax and a pricing congestion charge would not hit lower income households. It’s certainly not equitable to have people who use PT – and these include many people on low incomes – paying the high costs of both PT AND having to pay for roads through an individual household levy AND high rates that subsidise trucking.
Environment-related: Allowing our environmental base to be eroded as we have done in order to keep rates low, was always going to come back and bite us. The lack of equity is between generations – a 20-year-old today is facing a far more polluted and exploited environment than a 20-year-old a generation ago did. The targeted rates are adjusted for property value – perhaps you should submit that this needs to be accelerated, with lower property values paying even less, and higher property values paying even more?