Fuel Tax rort continues

The Auckland Council Annual Report is out, and Regional Fuel Tax (RFT) receipts for Auckland were up 10% for the 2023 year to $152 million (2022: $138m), despite the impacts of higher fuel prices and more electric vehicles.

However, council spending of the RFT monies only increased 6.7% to $111m (2022: $104m).

This continues the persistent trend since 2018, when the RFT was introduced, for council and Auckland Transport (AT) to accumulate RFT funds, which help its own cashflow needs, rather than spend the money on the projects identified in the approved scheme. This is basically robbing road users by taxing them and not spending it.

The RFT Reserve is now at $328m – accumulated over five years. Road users who pay this tax are right to feel aggrieved that council has used this money to support its finance needs while approved transport projects get delayed.

Road users don’t even get interest on these funds to compensate for project delays, while inflation ensures they will get progressively less for their money than it was worth when they filled up at the pump.

Most galling is the state of council’s roads and the lack of attention and priority given to them when RFT funding was available.

The approved scheme proposal for Project #12, with a $37m contribution from the RFT, was:

• capital expenditure on Lincoln Road and Matakana link road
• capital expenditure on Glenvar Road/East Coast Road intersection upgrade, Smales Road/Allens Road intersection upgrade, and Lake Road improvements
• capital expenditure on seal extensions

The contribution was increased to $106m this year, but so far council and AT have spent a paltry $3 million on Project #12. Last year it was $7 million (across all three categories of work).

Seal extension work has been a “shovel ready” project since before that term was coined, with local contractors available to carry out the work.

Surely some of the idle RFT funds could have been directed early to project #12 for seal extensions, rather than trickling out the allocated monies annually? The benefits of the work are clear. Sealing unsealed roads addresses the health and safety and drainage problems caused by dusty, rutted unsealed roads – most of which (76%) are in Rodney.

Doubtless council and AT will continue to excuse itself by citing outside factors such as covid, resource shortages, unexpected weather and long project lead times for the spending delays on major projects.

But whether the internal problem has been poor planning, lack of foresight, prioritisation mistakes, inadequate project and commitment management, or institutional and funding rigidity, surely someone could have said: “We’ve got all this money available for our defined transport projects but expenditure is lagging commitments on many so why don’t we sensibly spend it now on advancing other projects like fixing our broken roads ASAP – rather than waiting until we reach the end of the RFT period and try (and fail) to spend those project budgets all in a hurry.”

As council strives for a culture of building resilience in Auckland’s networks to cope with and respond to future “black swans”, what greater demonstration of inflexibility and lack of responsiveness is it to be sitting on $328 million of unspent RFT after having had five years to improve performance on those projects.

I bet if we had recall elections, some representatives would be demanding changes.

AT was given the opportunity to respond to this column but declined.