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An Auckland Council bid to sell Warkworth’s Baxter Street carpark was defeated at the last minute after Cr Greg Sayers and Rodney Local Board Chair Beth Houlbrooke joined forces to fight the proposal.
Both representatives gave vigorous presentations to Council’s Finance & Performance Committee on March 21, and Cr Sayers rallied local support on social media by encouraging residents and businesses to email councillors before and during the meeting.
As a result, the committee agreed to delay selling the site until alternative parking options had been explored, repair and maintenance funding issues had been resolved and a further report submitted, all within three months.
Cr Sayers said the result was a victory, although there was no guarantee that Council wouldn’t vote to sell the carpark at a future date.
“The main goal was to get the number of votes required to stop the approval of the sale,” he said. “Thanks to the community groundswell of taking action, we won that vital battle.”
The committee wants Council to explore whether there are better sites with at least the same number of carparks or more in Warkworth, and also whether the carpark could be sold with some kind of proviso that any purchaser would have to include carparking as part of development plans.
Council officers confirmed the main reason for wanting to sell the carpark to avoid the potential $500,000 cost of essential repairs and maintenance.
Ms Houlbrooke said it was extraordinary that Council had acquired such a major asset at amalgamation without allocating a maintenance budget for it.
“It’s mismanagement of a Council asset to let something deteriorate without any plan to do remedial work,” she said. “We’re getting increased pressure from Panuku (Council’s property management division) to divest that property, which is why we put its development in our Board Local Plan. We want to retain it and develop it.”
Both she and Cr Sayers stressed that Warkworth needed to increase parking, not reduce it, especially now the town was earmarked for even more significant growth. Ms Houlbrooke also pointed out that Auckland Transport was planning a trial bus service between the town and Silverdale next year, but had made no provision for extra parking around the service.
However, she was relieved that the carpark had been saved, for now at least.
“It was the best we could have hoped for under the circumstances,” she said. “At least they have got to come back with some options now. Had we not gone down there, it could just have sailed through. That’s what we need to do more of to make ourselves heard.”
