Auckland Council has formally asked the city’s port company to cool its heels on its controversial wharf extensions.
Following a firestorm of protests over the plan to extend one of the container wharves 100 metres out into the harbour, the council intends bringing forward a comprehensive study of the port and wants work to stop in the meantime.
It has written to Auckland Council Investments Ltd (ACIL), the body which owns the port on its behalf, asking it to hold fire until the study is completed in around a year’s time.
Work on the extensions to the Bledisloe container wharf is due to begin this month.
“We have opened up a discussion with ACIL… to reflect the concerns of this chamber that it would be appropriate while we’re going through this study for the port to consider the opportunity for a breather relating to the work on its consents,” Mayor Len Brown told a special meeting on the issue on Wednesday morning.
Despite being the 100 per cent owners of the port, the council said it did not have authority to tell Ports of Auckland to stop work.
The port company got consent to build the extensions under old regional council rules which did not require it to notify the public.
It also did not inform councillors, who only found out about the development in February.
Communication “certainly would have been appreciated”, Brown said.
“The port has operated down there for 170 years by and large within their own vacuum.
“The time for the port to not fully engage in its community as it goes forward and bring its community with it has passed.”
The planned study will investigate the economic, environmental and social impacts of having a port on the city’s waterfront.
The council was due to undertake the work after the new unitary plan comes in next year, but following the outcry over the Bledisloe extensions it is being brought forward.
The first step was to design the scope of the study and decide who should have input,” said Jacques Victor, the council’s general manager of Auckland plans, strategy and research.
Council officers hoped this could be done within a month, and that the full study would take around a year, he said.
The report would not say what should be done with the port.
“What comes out of the study, the council will thereafter have to make certain decisions,” Victor said.
Meanwhile opposition group Urban Auckland says it still intends to begin legal action on Thursday against the council and the port company over the Bledisloe extensions.
Issuing resource consents for the work was a miscarriage of justice, it claims.
Ports of Auckland CEO Tony Gibson has promised that if the study finds a better alternative the port will remove the Bledisloe extensions, but in the meantime it needs them to cope with increasingly larger vessels and more traffic through the port.
