Court needs to change ends

Tennis fans wanting to play at Port Albert will have to wait a while longer for the court at the recreation reserve to be renewed.

A Rodney Local Board workshop heard on June 4 that work to lay a new hard court had been proceeding well, until staff realised it had inadvertently been oriented from east to west, instead of north to south.

Auckland Council’s operations manager for Rodney, Geoff Pitman, said the east-west layout would have meant players would be serving into the sun, so a switch round was required.

“We identified that before we poured the concrete, so that was a good catch, but it was a mistake,” he told members. “We corrected the orientation, but of course that changed the footprint, which then meant we needed to go back to consents again.”

Board chair Brent Bailey suggested that the local board should get special treatment when it came to getting resource consents to improve its own assets.

“In the olden days we didn’t have to get them at all, ever,” he commented.

The new tennis court is part of a $475,000 project to improve facilities at the Wellsford Valley Road sports ground, including renewing the carpark and toilet block, removing the old hockey shed and scoping remedial works for the grandstand.

Once the tennis court has been shifted around and completed, it will have multi-line marking and include a basketball hoop at one end.

Pitman did not say how long it might take to get the new layout consented, but in the project delivery update presented to members, the estimated works completion for the project as a whole was listed as December 2027.