The Wellington City Council will today be deciding to spend money preparing to review its ten-year-old waterfront framework. The council will be wasting the money. It’s planning to ask questions to which it already knows the answers. There’s no need for a review.
Fifteen days ago we reported that the Wellington City Council had breached its design brief for the waterfront. Because this was a serious allegation, I referred it to the council and invited a response. Perhaps, I thought, the council might admit it had made a mistake. But since then: silence. The lack of response seems to be a sort of guilty plea from the council, which is usually quick to speak out in its own defence.
The Wellington City Council’s waterfront company is keeping the pressure on councilors to pay for two expensive and controversial projects which haven’t yet been approved.
By June next year, says Wellington Waterfront Ltd in its Statement of Intent which was given to councilors on Friday, plans for the temporary ice skating rink and the temporary sideless tent “will be significantly advanced, if not completed.”
City councilors have failed to persuade the council-owned Wellington Waterfront company to save money by reducing the cost of new public toilets.
In November, the councilors instructed the company to explore how to reduce the estimated $400,000 cost of new public toilets on the waterfront at Kumutoto.
What do you do if you own a waterfront events centre which has been reviled as looking like a Soviet ablution block? What do you do when almost all the reviews criticise its acoustics and sightlines? The last thing you’d do would be to consider making it bigger. Yet this is exactly what the owners of the building are talking about – “expanding the capacity” as “a possibility.”
Wellington’s new $11million wharewaka on Taranaki Wharf was supposed to be “a permanent expression of Maori art and culture.” But for six weeks next year it’s to be downgraded to become a place for parties and the sale of souvenirs.
I felt unreasonably smug at the weekend when I learnt that the Hilton Hotel on Princes Wharf in Auckland has had to close some of its best rooms because there are leaks in the walls.
Would this have also been the fate of a Hilton Hotel in Wellington, had it been allowed to build on the outer-Tee of Queens Wharf?
It takes a judge to tell us that one of the city’s landmark buildings is to be demolished.
Others involved have used less specific words. But in the Environment Court decision about the Overseas Passenger Terminal, Judge C J Thompson uses strikingly plain language:
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