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The thorny issue of the Rodney Local Board’s transport targeted rate spending has resurfaced as an election issue.
At a candidates’ meeting in Warkworth last month, Rodney Ward candidate and current Local Board member Beth Houlbrooke said that spending the rate on road sealing had not been an option.
Cr Greg Sayers, who is also contesting the ward seat, said both he and Cr John Watson, who was also at the meeting, were “a little surprised” at Houlbrooke’s comments that the Governing Body had provided a caveat over the Local Board.
“That didn’t seem correct to both our recollections,” he said. “Accordingly, I asked Auckland Council staff to clarify the situation the next day.”
In an email to Sayers, financial policy manager Andrew Duncan said the Local Board could reallocate funding to seal extensions. This could be done without further consultation, provided the expenditure was on the projects considered in the original proposal.
He said the risk was low for the Board, given that:
• Seal extension was included in the original targeted rate programme for public consultation in 2018
• Seal extension was replaced by public transport projects in the final targeted rate programme, on the basis that the Auckland Regional Land Transport Plan (RLTP) adopted included funding for seal extension in the Board area.
• The current RLTP did not have funding available for seal extension in the area
• Council’s Funding Impact Statement (FIS) provided for the use of the targeted rate revenue for activities that include road sealing.
Responding to Duncan’s comment, Houlbrooke said that the financial opinion was just one part of the story.
“When Board member Phelan Pirrie and I met with the authors of the report who would ultimately recommend the targeted rate to the Governing Body for approval, they told us that Auckland Transport had an issue with the sealing component of the rate and, consequently, they could not recommend the rate because of these objections.
“After consulting with the community on road sealing, we were gutted by this news,” she says. “We felt that it would leave us with egg on our face.
“However, because the targeted rate process had shown them how important this issue was in Rodney, their solution was to propose an increase to the sealing programme in the Regional Land Transport Plan, which they did to $121 million. We went from thinking the rug had been pulled from under us to believing it was a win-win for Rodney.”
Houlbrooke said that AT’s issue was that the Local Board would have full decision-making authority around how the money raised by the rate would be spent.
“They saw a conflict between their scientific approach to prioritising road sealing and our more politically influenced approach. We had also just been through two years of trying to get agreement on the spending of the Araparera forest targeted rate and they were definitely not keen to go through a process like that again.”
Houlbrooke said that while there was still around $4 million of targeted rate funding unallocated, it was in the Warkworth subdivision.
“Most of the unsealed roads listed in the 2018 consultation document were in the Wellsford subdivision.”
She said projects being considered for the remaining funding included an on-demand shuttle service around Warkworth and a scheduled shuttle to Leigh and Sandspit, as well as a footpath on Wilson Road.
