Aware as I am of many of the labyrinthine inner workings of the behemoth that is Auckland Council, I have, over the years, had to remind our journalists that Waiheke’s public open spaces and assets are not ‘council-owned’. Council (or, in the case of regional parks, ‘central government’) are stewards, not the overlords of their ratepayer fiefdoms and public assets.
It’s a distinction for our newspaper but also for senior council officials who picked up the quasi-benevolent vibe of ‘council-owned’ and are now using it unrestrainedly.
I have yet to find evidence that the council has been gifted the island’s parks that the former Waiheke County Council lost in two successive and massively homogenising supercity aggregations in the last 30 years.
Islanders have long been concerned that the city has barely started to address the looming climate emergency hazards it has denied for decades. And that it has no money to spend out here in the city’s wider communities in the coming decades anyway.
We’ve worried about new builds in known flood areas and beach and cliff erosion – and loudly said so when a council consent was issued for a house on the sand at Onetangi’s western end 10 years ago.
On its website, Auckland Council’s Waiheke Island Shoreline Adaptation Plan soothingly commends its diligent service to the community and outlines its initial intention to categorise only the hazards to ‘council-owned’ assets.
However, there is data there that we can work with; each neighbourhood grouping or sports and special interest watchdog network bringing a wealth of local knowledge to the immediate environments they use and love.
We ignore the opportunity for action at our peril. This is a chance to cement in expectations for the future when we will need to demand more resources than the city currently cares to give us.
By now, most of us have been shocked that Auckland Council keeps three-quarters of Waiheke’s annual rates take for itself, and we can only quail at the news last week that Auckland Transport has lined up a proposed funding shortfall of $100 billion over the next 30 years.
By then, the CBD will be in dire straits and the fate of Waiheke’s public beaches, regional and local parks and coastal structures will be sealed.
If we kept $20 million of our rates money every year, instead of a miserly $7 million, we could do the job ourselves. We did before. But at this point, the island is strapped for cash and budgets have been hollowed out everywhere.
Strong public feedback on the current Shoreline Adaptation Plan in the short term and a build-up of cohesive interest groups to tackle sustainability and resilience into the future will be essential to our survival as a community, along with adequate funding.
The plan has four adaptation strategies: ‘No active intervention’, which leaves nature to itself; ‘Limited intervention’, with repair and maintenance of existing protection structures, and ‘Hold the line’, which means the coastal edge is fixed at a certain location, engineered and hard structures are envisaged and nature-based options considered.
The fourth stage is long term ‘Managed retreat’, which is all-in engagement with stakeholders and professionals, with assets and land uses relocated.
A table of strategies and timelines for each piece of public land makes feedback pretty easy, and officials are likely to be responsive to submissions on detail of how, and how much, we use and value our beaches and the walkways that are eagerly sought out by both residents and visitors.
In the plan, Surfdale’s south-west facing shoreline is earmarked for limited intervention into the medium term and managed retreat in the long term. The Blackpool shoreline has limited intervention in the short term, followed by wholesale managed retreat. The Church Bay coastline to southern Mātiatia gets limited intervention, and so does the Owhanake to Mātiatia walkway.
Only a few key transport hubs warrant the ‘Hold the line’ approach in the longer term – Mātiatia, Kennedy Point (oddly earmarked as Kennedy Point Marina but presumably for the sake of the vehicular ferry port), the Causeway and the eastern end’s Orapiu Wharf.
The Donald Bruce Road coastline gets no active intervention and the Pūtiki Bay foreshore reserve gets limited intervention, then managed retreat.
Stretches of Waiheke’s unoccupied northern coastline gets no active intervention and nor do the eastern and western ends of Onetangi Beach, which gets initial limited intervention, followed by managed retreat in the longer term.
Oneroa Bay is mostly allotted with a strategy of limited intervention in the short term and managed retreat thereafter.
The devil will be in the detail, so hard-won public access to coastlines with adjacent cliff walks like Church Bay to Mātiatia might need saving.
All this is predicated on sea-water levels only rising a metre or so in the next hundred years. We don’t have years to address the real-time oceanic effects of polar ice melt and the disappearance of glaciers.
And Auckland’s 1.7million residents are especially vulnerable, according to Victoria University professor Tim Naish. While the global sea level is expected to rise about 0.5 metres by 2100, for substantial parts of New Zealand it could be closer to 1 metre because the land is sinking at the same time.
It is predicted sea levels will rise 50 percent faster in the city’s downtown waterfront and several central-city suburbs, with wide-ranging implications for house prices and insurance rates.
• Liz Waters
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