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Last week Mayor Wayne Brown proposed a major shakeup to various Council Controlled Organisations as part of his ‘Mayoral Proposal’ for the 2025/26 Annual Plan. This is the biggest proposed change to the CCO model since the establishment of Auckland Council, and would see significant functions performed by Eke Panuku, Tataki Auckland Unlimited and Auckland Transport brought back under direct Council control. Here’s a summary of what’s proposed:
Eke Panuku Development Auckland
Mayor Brown’s proposal includes bringing urban regeneration and property management back in-house under council control, to ensure better alignment and integration with other growth-related activities, which would result in the disestablishment of Eke Panuku. All policy, strategy and planning functions would also return to council.
“Auckland Council is already responsible for urban regeneration through planning and regulation of land use,” Mayor Brown said.
“Eke Panuku’s involvement in urban regeneration has led to duplication and confusion around the accountability of projects.
“My proposal will enable local boards to have greater decision-making power over local urban regeneration so there is a more community-focused approach to local placemaking,” Mayor Brown said.
Tātaki Auckland Unlimited
Mayor Brown is proposing to retain Tātaki Auckland Unlimited’s trust structure to manage regional facilities, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland Zoo, theatres and stadiums.
Economic development, destination marketing and major events would be consolidated within council.
Auckland Council’s main lever for economic development is planning for land use and infrastructure to support future growth.
The proposed changes will integrate other economic development activities, like support for targeted industries and investment attraction, with the council’s broader role in growing the regional economy.
“The main focus of economic development must be on using our planning tools to lift regional productivity so that all Aucklanders can enjoy a higher standard of living.
“There is a fine line between public good and private benefit when it comes to targeted industry support for things like film and tourism.
“I believe these activities need greater democratic accountability and scrutiny to determine the role they play in Auckland’s growth,” Mayor Brown said.
The proposed changes to Tātaki Auckland Unlimited will not affect service levels, with ratepayer funding for economic development unchanged in the Long-term Plan.
Auckland Transport
Auckland Transport, unlike the other CCOs, is a statutory body. Any structural changes to AT will require legislation.
In August 2023, the Transport and Infrastructure Committee of the Governing Body gave Mayor Brown a mandate to advocate for legislative changes that will restore democratic control of Auckland’s transport system.
“I have made significant progress in my discussions with central government since then,” Mayor Brown said.
Last week, the Minister for Local Government and Transport, Hon. Simeon Brown, confirmed that the Cabinet has authorised him to work with the mayor on options for transport governance reform.
“The minister and I agree that Aucklanders should be empowered, through their elected mayor and councillors, to make key decisions about the region’s transport system. I will have more to say on that in due course,” Mayor Brown said.
In the interim, Mayor Brown is proposing to take immediate steps to begin the process of taking back control from AT. These measures include a proposal for Auckland Council to assume control of AT’s back-office functions.
“As funder and shareholder, Auckland Council has the right to put conditions on our funding. I have proposed that we get advice on how we can make operational funding of AT’s back-office functions conditional on Auckland Council providing those services,” Mayor Brown said.
These functions will include communications and marketing, legal and finance services. AT will also be mandated to participate in the council’s Group Shared Services programme for information technology, human resources and payroll.
“I have also proposed that Auckland Council take responsibility for all regulatory, policy and strategic planning functions for which AT does not have a statutory role. This includes rules around street trading, as well as the Harbourmaster function,” Mayor Brown said.
I’ll get to Auckland Transport in a minute, but completely disestablishing Eke Panuku seems like a bad idea – especially coming on top of the government significantly reducing the role and influence of their redevelopment agency – Kainga Ora. Urban redevelopment is complicated, takes time, but is so immensely valuable to the future of this city. If Eke Panuku have sometimes underwhelmed us, it’s because they haven’t had the financial backing they really needed. But with the Council’s core planners more interested in protecting ‘character’ at the cost of anything, and the Auckland Design Office long gutted, there’s a massive risk disestablishing Eke Panuku will leave a massive vacuum nobody is able to fill.
Turning to Auckland Transport, the Mayoral Proposal and staff advice supporting its development articulate the case for change as being largely around an understandable dissatisfaction elected members have about the lack of control and democratic accountability they have over by far the largest area of expenditure – and often the area of council that’s of greatest interest to the public.
Auckland Transport through its establishment, was given special protection under legislation as the sole provider of transport services, planning and delivery for Auckland.
It’s important to recognise that we are the only region in New Zealand that doesn’t democratically elect the people responsible for regional transport planning and strategy. Based on staff analysis, this also makes us an outlier internationally.
While councillors get to appoint the board, AT’s special legal status sets it apart from any other CCO. In reality, this makes it very difficult for us to effect change or determine the direction of transport planning for Auckland. As a result, over time, public trust and confidence has been eroded and the sense of democratic accountability has been lost.
In August 2023, the Transport & Infrastructure Committee gave me a mandate to advocate for legislative changes that will restore democratic control of Auckland’s transport system.
I have made significant progress in my discussions with central government since then. Earlier this year, the Minister for Auckland and Minister of Transport, Hon. Simeon Brown, publicly acknowledged the need for change, announcing that a work programme was underway to reform transport governance in Auckland.
We agree that Aucklanders should be empowered, through their elected mayor and councillors, to make key decisions about the region’s transport system. We also share concerns that Auckland Transport needs reform and that its decision-making has not adequately reflected Aucklanders’ views or responded effectively to their needs for moving efficiently around our city.
While it’s usually concerning when the two Browns agree on something – and we certainly probably differ in terms of what we might criticise Auckland Transport’s decision-making – the lack of control the Council has over key transport strategy, planning and policy matters has long been a concern of ours. Including right back to when Auckland Transport was first being established.
There are probably too many specific examples of how Auckland Transport has undermined the council to point to, but a few stick out over the years as being particularly egregious:
- The way Auckland Transport did everything they could between around 2017 and 2022 to undermine development of a connected safe cycling network. Behind our satirical April Fool’s Day post in 2021 was a deep anger that despite a massively supportive political environment and more available funding than ever, Auckland Transport somehow managed to make slower progress in rolling out a safe cycling network than they had in the years before.
- The way Auckland Transport messed up the 2018 and 2021 Regional Land Transport Plans. First, in 2018 Auckland Transport deliberately undermined the council and the government to the point of Ministers and Mayors needing to directly step in. Then in 2021 they produced an RLTP that directly contradicted the council’s emissions reduction targets so much that somehow we ended up with the farcical situation of the council and AT defending the RLTP in court while also developing an emissions reduction pathway to fix up the mess they’d made. Even earlier this year, when understandably the political direction was more tricky, AT still managed to have no logic behind their prioritisation process.
- And speaking of fallout from the farcical 2021 RLTP, Auckland Transport then did their very best to undermine the one bit of actual visionary transport planning we’ve seen in recent times – the Transport Emissions Reduction Pathway.
Auckland Transport has also done some great things – most notably a major revamp of the bus network, getting City Rail Link over the line and ready for implementation, and successfully overseeing the introduction of electric trains. Some of these – especially the bus network changes – had lots of tricky local impacts that means they may not have happened if AT had just been a part of the Council. We have also seen – eventually – steady expansion of the bus lane network to help improve the public transport network’s efficiency.
Given this, it was good to see that a fairly comprehensive assessment of different options for reforming AT were looked at (sprinkled through different parts of the staff advice). These seem to have been the main options looked at:
This covers the full spectrum from status quo right through to the disestablishment of Auckland Transport. Option AT2 is the one that forms part of the Mayor’s proposal. This is what’s suggested:
In my role as Mayor and in line with the direction provided by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, I will continue to pursue legislative change through engagement with central government. I will keep you updated as discussions progress. I support, in principle, a full reset bringing all transport policy, strategy and planning functions back to Auckland Council. I propose that Auckland Council, as a funder, take responsibility for providing backoffice functions to AT. This should include communications and marketing, legal and finance services. I will seek advice from staff on how this can be implemented from 1 July 2025, with consideration given to budget decisions and funding conditions.
There are also other non-legislative changes we can and should get on with. As a first step, I propose we review existing delegations from Auckland Council to Auckland Transport, with a view to bringing these functions back in-house. These include rules around street trading, as well as the Harbourmaster function.
I would also like Auckland Council to take responsibility for all transport policy and strategic planning functions for which AT does not have a statutory role.
As discussed later in this proposal, Auckland Transport must fully participate in the Group Shared Services programme.
Of all the options on the table, this does seem to find the best balance. The status quo clearly hasn’t worked, despite a lot of efforts to make ‘soft changes’ to it by the Council over the years. Fully disestablishing AT is also likely to be very problematic, bringing a huge number of what should be operational decisions into the political realm of the Council. Option AT3, where AT is narrowed down to focus on public transport delivery, actually seems like one of the most common structures around the world and could mean better ‘street level’ integration between transport and urban development. But it also breaks the multi-modal function of the organisation and splits PT operations away from PT capital projects, which is a nightmare elsewhere around the country. 3b just sounds stupid.
One of the odd things about the proposal is that while it’s wrapped into the 2025/26 Annual Plan process, it doesn’t seem like there’s an intention for public consultation and engagement on any of the CCO changes. Council is guilty of over-consulting on things all the time, but this is a pretty major change to how local government operates in Auckland and it seems like quite a lot of value could be added through properly bringing this into the Annual Plan consultation process.
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Yes, AT2 seems sensible. It’s the good old “governance v. management” split, isn’t it? Council proposes, AT disposes.
AT got CRL across the line, say you. I don’t think so. John Key set up up CRL as its own company deliberately to avoid AT getting involved until the very end – like now when the stations tracks and tunnels have been built and CRL hands it over to AT and KiwiRail.
AT2 seems best.
Q: What would prevent AT restructures from being as regressive and undermining of council policy as each restructure has been in the last seven or eight years? Pushing the future-focused staff out has happened under all political environments. Good governance should have fixed this problem, ensuring restructures assisted the delivery of policy. But we’ve had really shitty governance.
Would this change under AT2?
Yes, I’m wondering if all this change will help. Maybe will save some money but often in restructures I often hear it’s the same people by and large that end up rejigged around, like the old KiwiRail and ONTRACK change about.
We will need legislative change to rejig AT I have long advocated making the governance model the same as every other region as we had under the ARC pre 2010. Every other region has a Regional Land Transport Committee consisting largely of representatives of its constituent councils augmented with seconded members representing relevant interest groups. The Auckland RLTC up until 2010 included reps of bus and freight operators, walkers and cyclists, disabled persons (usually blind), Transit NZ, etc. They had monthly public meetings which usually attended for over a decade. Now the ARLTC is virtually the same as the AT Board so there is no sense if democratic oversight or control. So there is no need to dream up a new law, just scrap the transport provisions of the Auckland Council Act and revert to the old legislation still in use everywhere else.
AT has achieved more in terms of public transport and cycling than the old ARC ever managed despite all those representatives attending meetings.
If I recall correctly, the current way our city is managed, was developed by a certain Mr Hyde (not Doctor Jekyll unfortunately).
It has been an absolute shambles since then (also before then but I am only in my early forties so I will stick with my known timeline, rather than any manufactured nostalgia).
Auckland Transport would be better named ABSOLUTE TRAFFIC (although there is a traffic management company with this name).
We could have Light Rail, and reduce the need for endless queues of buses.
We could insist that parking buildings are renovated to become apartments, and begin to address the ever intensifying housing crisis.
We could stop private motor vehicles from entering many areas, to reduce the risk of death for the walking not yet deads among us.
Not everything can be blamed on the current central government, but you could certainly point your finger at one particular political party which is part of the present coalition. The irony being that the leader of that political party resides in Auckland (all current parties in the coalition are led by Aucklanders too).
So our mayor, although I disagree with his manner, and I hold my head in shame that Paris can have a woman mayor, but we are stuck with a person comparable to the current and next president of the USA, at least in time upon this planet; seems to in fact be perhaps doing something about Auckland’s real problem, which is TRAFFIC.
The simple solution is to ban fossil fueled powered vehicles, give everybody a bicycle, and do what Cuban society was forced to do in the 1990s, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Everybody there became very healthy; so perhaps in a time when we keep getting told that the money is running out, we could stop wasting energy on running, and ride a bike?!?
bah humbug
Hey, slightly older than me man, take Winston being an Aucklander out of your month he’s Northland’s son and he can stay there
I agree that the governance and delivery of transport functions needs a good shake-up, especially to ensure that Council strategy is implemented in practice. However, I’m doubtful that this will ease the calls for “accountability” by the wider public who blame AT (often unfairly) for every ill that they perceive in the transport field.
I’m also sceptical that the Council will provide better leadership under a new governance system.
I vividly remember how AT would annually present Council with a list of projects in priority order (with a red line across the page at the position indicated as fundable with the proposed funding). Councillors were encouraged to review the list and to propose changes to the prioritisation based on their interpretation of policy, strategy etc. The reality is that hardly ever (if indeed ever) were any changes made.
The reason: within the funding provided, any promotion of a project to be “above the red line” necessarily required another project to be demoted below the line – meaning it would not proceed. Councillors rightly recognised that they would be setting themselves against their colleagues and that almighty sh*t fights would result on the Council floor where parochial interests would be to the fore, rather than any cohesive vision of regional priorities. Far better to just vote the plan through and make AT take the heat over which projects proceeded and which were dropped. What often happened is that Councillors who didn’t raise a murmur at the Council table would subsequently excoriate AT for not proceeding with their “pet” project.
We also seem, collectively, to have short memories about the bad old days pre-AT when transport planning and decision making were intensely political. Of course, projects involving major capital expenditures will always be political in nature, and rightly so. But let’s hope that the new structure doesn’t bend too much to the current global political mania for populist decisions rather than evidence-based decisions. Merely replacing the dominance of technocrats with an agenda with politicians with an agenda doesn’t guarantee better outcomes.
“Councillors rightly recognised that they would be setting themselves against their colleagues and that almighty sh*t fights would result on the Council floor”
Well, that is what decision-making sometimes needs to be. We’re not electing Councillors to take the easiest way out.
Exactly – and that they were not prepared to do that was IMO a dereliction of duty.
Reminder that the Ombudsman’s Investigation into AT is still open for submissions. Final day is Friday.
The investigation centres on requests for information (which the LGOIMA Act notes do not have to mention the LGOIMA provisions but do apply to specific types of information) and on Meetings (eg AT Board Meetings).
I guess we need to see the results of this investigation to know if any of these structural solutions would solve the problems that might be revealed.
One question I’d like an answer to is this.
Will any of these proposed changes do anything to counter the influence of Waka Kotahi in the running of Auckland’s Roads?
Case in point: Ponsonby Road is probably Auckland’s premier dining street and with the demise of Newmarket it’s premier shopping street. Visit on any sunny weekend day and it’s full of people ……. and cars. Parked cars and four lanes of traffic with buses and trucks trying to get through. I’ve heard for years locals and their representatives have tried to get the car parking removed, bus lanes installed, traffic lanes removed but every time WK have stopped the progress. The argument being that Ponsonby Road is an ‘Arterial Route’ and as such WK has jurisdiction.
So no matter how the mayor and others fiddle with the structure of AT, Waka Kotahi (and it’s masters – Simon & Simeon) is/are lurking in the background. They know that despite what everyone will laud as a huge victory for governance, it ain’t really because WK will still control the arterials.
“The argument being that Ponsonby Road is an ‘Arterial Route’ and as such WK has jurisdiction.”
You are really messing up (or more likely, misunderstanding) responsibilities and terms. An “arterial” road is not under NZTA control, UNLESS it is also a State Highway. So in many rural towns (and some parts of Auckland), both are the same, and yes, NZTA / Waka Kotahi have a lot of control in that case. But since Ponsonby Road is an arterial, but not a state highway, no, NZTA doesn’t control it at all .
[However, indirectly you have the finger on SOMETHING – being that Simeon Brown very much would like to dictate arterials (and everything else) for us. So for example, he recently passed policies/regulations affecting speed limits and traffic calming, making rules that affect what is about what is permitted or forbidden on arterials.
At risk of making a quibble which you may care about, he did that through other policies, not through NZTA suddenly controlling arterials, however.
I think he simply used “jurisdiction” when he meant “sway”… The point’s a good one.
AT and AC should have stood up to WK on the function of local roads long ago. We do need a fix for this, and it’s going to have to be that the MOAR ROADS creeps in AT pull their heads in by a better CEO, a better Board, a better governance structure, and a better Council. Fingers crossed, eh?
Also, you raise a good point about Simeon Brown. This WK control of local roads should have been stopped years ago. Maybe, given Council full well understands the destruction Simeon Brown is causing, now is the time to force the issue.
Is there any evidence of WK interfering in ponsonby road stuff? My understanding is any work attempted there has been brutally opposed by businesses and local politicians.
We have to be careful what we wish for, remembering that the National party minister was voted in and his National party primary won the election in part from a more roads. less cycleways and “annoying” speed bumps, potholes and cones transport policy so what are we going to end up with more of?
Policy is policy. Sometimes it’s sh**. The issue is WHO sets that policy?
As long as somehow the transfer from a more-or-less independent agency to Auckland Council control doesn’t somehow end up with some functions “relocated” to Wellington, I can live with the reality that sometimes policies are sh**. At least if we elect a progressive Council, they can then do something about it, instead of falling somewhere between fuming-and-useless and using-the-distance-as-an-excuse about an agency not doing what it is told…
Agreed. Strong statutory entities like NZTA and AT can soften the binge-purge cycle of political parties. Remember that PT in all other centres in NZ with meaningful PT is mediated through regional councils. Auckland doesn’t have one, and frankly AC is incoherent in many of its planning functions, and AT is the closest substitute to a regional council dedicated to focus on integrated transport planning.
Since I arrived in Auckland in the last years of the previous century the population here, has grown by more then 50%.
Whilst the amount of tarseal has grown astronomically where farmland has been converted to housing, the growth in the amount of roading, and parking surface, has been very modest, in the previously built up areas. Certainly no where near a 50% increase.
And yet people can generally still get around, albeit generally more slowly then before.
And how has the majority of the growth in movement requirements been met in the previously built up areas?
Certainly not by hard sealing the number of hectares required to move and store the required number of private motor vehicles to accomplish it.
The majority of of these additional required movements have been accomplished by the massive transformation of our public transport system.
And more recently, better accomodation of micro mobility, cycling and scootering.
We abandoned, the ideologically driven, but hopeless, competing modes of public transport providers.
We instead changed towards a fully integrated public transport system.
We have massively upgraded our rail network, still in progress.
We have built a busway, more to follow. We have built a network of cross town seven day a week frequent bus services.
So AT has actually accomplished a lot. But perhaps not for the premium car brigade.
And by doing so, we have saved ourselves acres of tar seal, and cubic kilometres of toxic emissions. And made our tamariki more independent of parental chauffeuring.
But those who spend fortunes on premium motorcar, and those who sell them, and those who just don’t do public transport, and those who vote ACT, are increasingly concerned about their loss of relitive privilege.
It is simply a class war, masquerading as economics.
The battle cry of opponents to cycleways, traffic calming, and bus lanes is just thinly disguised OUT OF MY WAY, pleb!
More cycling now is whats needed for good ness sake .
Lol to all the people who think that greater AC control will result in a more evidence based approach to transport shifting away from private vehicle use. The mayor himself has hurled fury against paying for city centre parking at night, 24/7 bus lanes on K Rd and railled against GNR cycleway coz he rode a bike on the footpath 1 time. Yes AT didn’t deliver on good transport when the political climate was better suited and had some poor RLTPs but an agency independent of direct political influence should take the peaks out of major political swings bith ways. As the blog points out the entire bus route changes could have been shut down on the whims of a councilor or two who knew a guy up the road who didn’t like a new bus stop outside their house. We’d be back to getting nowhere because each swing of the political pendulum would set a new direction that could not be achieved in 1-2 political terms. In the current political environment we could very well see bus lanes reverted to traffic lanes coz Jimmy up the road said to the Councillor that no one rides the buses, based on that one time he needed to drive on Onewa Rd
Auckland Transport (AT) needs to be totally restructured. Their wilful congestion of our roads under the guise of Safety & Improved Efficiency was an outright lie. The beneficiaries of the AT legislation was and is the Multi National Road Building Conglomerate who infiltrated the “Business Round Table”, then Auckland Council and Auckland Transport in an attempt to usurped the democratic process. In short AT has been captured by the private road constructing corporations intent on profiting at all cost! Restructure this corrupt system immediately.
This might help explain part of the reason AT (& AC) signed off a developers infrastructure on Oraha Rd, Huapai, which is in breach of the Commissioners full & final report. Oraha Rd is not part of the SHA but the Oraha Rd SHA is in such a ridiculous place a condition was to install connecting infrastructure & drainage. The path is now illegally diverting water onto private properties gouging out driveways and undercutting banks that were not retained on the side of the road the path was not meant to go, has turned the road into a drain and constantly causing damage to the road, recently resealed, already starting developing pot holes and an undulating surface.
The wilful congestion of our roads is mostly caused by an ever growing population without any increase in road capacity and poor alternatives to driving.
Any of you remember Auckland’s public transport before AT was put in charge? That’s the risk of amalgamating most things in-house would look like. AT is a structural “international outlier” because New Zealand has over 40% of its transport trips concentrated in about 15% of its land and in one region alone. You just need to go back to the purposes of amalgamation in the first place.
The complaints about not focusing on cycling enough is disproportionate to the 1% of Auckland trips actually taken on cycling. That shift away from urban cycling actually started in the 1980s with cheap Japanese car imports and improvements are gradual. Take a breath and look at the actual results of AT-NZTA cycling design and construction cooperation. You won’t get that again if you gut it.
As for the complaints from local politicians, that won’t work until Auckland Council provides meaningful delegations of decision-making and budgets to them. That won’t be solved with restructuring AT.
Exactly what is AC trying to solve here?
I think the mayor wants to be able to shut down projects he hates in a whim.
Also people do not understand, that AT has been restructured, and for a long time delivered 90%+ of what was promised. And now, that AT finally starts delivering, the mayor wants to shut down everything.
Also, personally I don’t think that Council is going to make good decisions. They are elected for 3 years. If there will be big political swings, we will have a totally different direction every 3 years…
Eku Panuku should be disbanded, they have a habit of selling off public land and assets, the money does not go back into the community it is stripped from, often this land could have valuable use for the communities it is robbed from. Lot of questionable things happening too if you really look into it.
Well, now they are going to set up a 30(!) year plan with the current government.
I am not very optimistic about upcoming changes.