Newmarket celebrates its first birthday

In 2010 I stood in the local government elections on a policy platform of creating “strong local leadership”.

Shortly after being elected, I distribution 1,200 fliers to households in Newmarket and the following article was published in the local paper.

After the frist meeting of local residents which attracted 42 people, the Newmarket Community Association became an incorporated society on the 4th August 2011.

This month the Newmarket Community Association will celebrate its first birthday.

It has been an inspiring first year with residents taking on many issues and seeing great results:

Newmarket Park – Tree Planting Day with Newmarket Primary School, undertaking a community survey on the future use of the park, re-opening of the park, and establishing a resident volunteer group.

Rail Level Crossing on Sarawera Street –  Working alongside Auckland Transport to prioritise this project for local residents on Laxon Terrace.

Newmarket Transport Planning / Station Square – Providing feedback to Auckland Transport and the Waitemata Local Board on Newmarket Transport issues.

Thank you to the strong leadership of the chairperson Bernard Kendall and your committee. I have been amazed by the dedication and passion that everyone in the association has offered the Newmarket Community.

For more information visit the facebook group Newmarket Community Association (NCA)

The Annual General Meeting will be held on Tuesday 7th August 2012 at the Parnell Community Centre from 7pm.

How accessible is our community?

Auckland Transport are planning to develop a corridor management plan for Khyber Pass Road and Broadway. This will provide the framework to manage issues like accessibility and urban design along the corridor.

This weekend I meet with my good friend and Grey Lynn Local Red Nicholson to experience first hand what it’s like to move in and around Newmarket to Eden Terrace in a wheelchair.

There are lots of other challenges we face in Newmarket:

• six large development sites yet to be built,

• a plan change 196 to encourage more intensification,

• more traffic moving through Newmarket than stopping in Newmarket with the merger of Remuera Road, Great South Road, Manukau Road,

• more people in busses through Newmarket than cars,

• the second busiest train station in Auckland,

• the highest concentration of school children in Auckland, and

• a bustling business community.

And one of the key challenges for me is that we develop a community that is accessible www.beaccessible.org.nz

Movies in Waitemata parks

With the Governing Body’s Annual Plan announcement last week a few initiatives didn’t make the cut. One of those initiatives was movies in the park. I’m sure like many of you reading this article your are sad to see them go from our parks. This event programme over summer is one of the most community minded activities that residents in Waitemata enjoy. Hundreds of people from all across the neighbourhood come to join in the fun of King Kong walking through Grey Lynn Park or King of Kong in Silo Park.

As the shared events portfolio holder with Shale Chambers I have been tightening our events meetings over the last month to get down to business with a fixed agenda with fixed agenda items. Only achievable now that the corporate restructuring has started to settle down.

But there is a real story to be told about the movement of the council events budget and the sad demise of the movies in the park budget.

The events budget, under the old Auckland Council was held by a localised events team, and it was for the time being transferred to the CCO Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED) during transition. As the restructuring took place ATEED decided to reshape the movies in the park. They changes a timely local tradition and created a regionalised programme. There were movies in the parks in all corners of the Auckland Region for the first time. And I’m sure that Councillors and Local Board members in these wards would have thought this was a bit of a bonus from transition.

Even until today the Waitemata Local Board has not been able to recoup the events budgets of yesteryear’s, with much of the localised events budget being swallowed by ATEEDs Rugby World Cup opening night and now other governing body initiatives.

Contestable annual events fund

Our board for Waitemata made a conscious decision to fund events by establishing a contestable events fund of $100k. This has allowed the board to continue to fund large local events like Grey Lynn Festival, Art in the Dark, Parnell Festival of Roses, and a new one this year “Wag’n Walk” (our first event as a corporate sponsor achieving positive community outcomes).

This month I indicated to our events team that I want the board to build our localised events program. We have music in the parks each season in the Auckland Domain which provides a fixture of events in a single location. The turnout to these events are outstanding. However, for the western part of our ward from Grey Lynn to Hern Bay there is no fixture of events apart from the Grey Lynn festival, now that the two movies in the park events have been axed. Indicatively I have suggested that the events team put forward a recommended fixture of movie events in Grey Lynn Park along with a youth event in the intercity. Of course the board will need to weigh the events up against any other event in our contestable fund and can look at sponsorship to make the event more sustainable in the long-term.

In the summer of 1999, as the Chair of the Auckland City Youth Council I raised $23,000 through eight community boards, one charitable trust and a road safety trust to hold 9 youth concerts across parks in the Auckland isthmus. This was on the ground swell of many youth bands that were unable to play in bars or clubs due to the drinking age being 21. The largest concert we held was in Myers Park with over 2,500 people in attendance along the grassy banks. These concerts ran on the smell of an oily rag, with an amazing Anne Wentworth the events manager naively offering her services to coordinate the events if I got the money. Little did she know of my persuasive skills. But impressed she managed to wrangle Fur Patrol along. As a result of the event the Auckland City Council granted $10k to the Youth Council the following year.

Auckland has had a history of providing youth events, like dancing in the street in Beresford Square or Fleet Street Festival on Fleet Street. With the establishment of a Youth Advisory group in Waitemata working alongside Jesse Chambers our youths portfolio holder we could look at this opportunity.

St Mary’s Bay Parking Trial

When I door knocked 9,000 homes in the Waitemata ward in 2010 the number one resident issue was parking, parking and parking.

The availability of on-street parking is a concern for residents that have no off street carparking living in or near the inner-city. And the most affected areas in the ward are Parnell, Seccombes Ave, Grafton, Freeman’s Bay, St Mary’s Bay and Ponsonby because of all-day parking commuters.

Over the years the Council has had many different parking schemes and there are still remnants of these across the ward. From resident only carparks to p120 resident except. However, the general philosophy from previous councils has been to create a “sinking lid” policy on resident parking. So if you buy a house today that previously had a resident only on street carpark you were no longer able to apply for the permit.

As a local board we initiated Auckland Transport in early 2011 to review carparking with the intent to:

• Encouraging commuters and students to use public transport.
• Provide more accessibility to on street carparking for residents and retailers.

Auckland Transport has initiated three large parking reviews in our ward:

Central City Parking Zone – A single approach to pricing and managing car park availability will apply within the zone. click here to read the website. The website doesn’t mention that another outcome is to reduce the number of footpath parking signage which has the potential to improve the clutter around the city and save money.

Eden Terrace Parking Plan – This parking review is underway to reduce commuter parking and improve retail accessibility. This has been an issue the Eden Terrace Business assoication and myself as the elected representative on the baord has been able to push through. Click here to findout more about plans in Eden Terrace.

St Mary’s Bay Resident Parking Permit Trial – Auckland Transport started a trial in St Mary’s Bay on the 23 July to try out Resident Parking Permits.

Prior to the trial, initial feedback was sort from residents and this included there concerns about the cost of permits and this has been taken into consideration. But resident parking permits aren’t new and the team at Auckland Transport have been looking at Wellington and Australian cities for examples of best practise.

There were many other communities screaming out to trial the parking permits, so don’t worry Seccombes Ave we will come back to you after the trial. But the St Mary’s Bay community was chosen because it is ideally positioned to test commuter parking before and after the re-opening of the Jacob’s ladder walkway into the city.

If this trial is successful, the potential is that we will have a new “parking tool” that can be implemented in different parts of the inner-city. Over the next few years resident parking permits in our inner-city communities have the potential to free-up parking for our residents and act as a significant catalyst to encourage more Aucklanders onto public transport.

Residents prioritise the natural environment in Newmarket Park

3,000 surveys were distributed to households in Newmarket, Parnell and Remuera in March to provide feedback on the future of Newmarket Park.

Residents of the Newmarket Community Association worked with council to develop and distribute the survey. The survey was also distributed through the library, local cafes, corner dairies, the Parnell Farmer’s Market and through our neighbours on the Orakie Local Board. Along with the postal survey, there has been an online version of the survey that has been emailed to community groups such as the Parnell Community Committee and Newmarket Rotary.

Martin Putterill and Graham Brown of the Newmarket Community Association have been the key proponents of the survey and have now established a regular meeting with the council’s parks team to discuss on-going improvements with the park.

Community feedback from the survey will be used to align the park management plan and inform how the Waitemata Local Board will allocate $60,000 it has earmarked for further improvements.

Overall it was a great response. I’ve been told by council staff that it was a higher response then previous annual plan submissions. There were 392 responses to the survey; 260 residents and 132 students from Parnell College.

There were many common themes between the resident and student feedback, with the number one priority to improve the natural environment, the flora and fauna in the park, along with more trees for shade and links to other parks.

The biggest difference between the two surveys is the need for young people to have more active recreational activities in Newmarket, like skateboarding or movies in the park.

Auckland writes a new rulebook

As New Zealand’s biggest city, carrying the weight of a third of the nation’s population, the only thing constant in Auckland’s planning and regulatory environment at the moment is change.

Two years ago the Auckland region had seven local authorities operating under different community and regulatory plans that have now merged into Auckland’s Super City. The transition has been a challenging time for the more than 9,000 council staff but for most Aucklanders the change has been seamless; the rubbish continues to be collected each week. But, underlying this change is a major paradigm shift and the new rulebook is called the Unitary Plan.

After a year of planning Auckland Council adopted the mayor’s vision “the world’s most liveable city”.

The mayoral vision to be a “liveable city” in its purest form is based on internationally recognised quality of life indices that are used to benchmark cities and countries worldwide. The quality of life survey is undertaken world-wide by Mercer and in 2011 it ranked Auckland 3rd for Quality of Life, 10th for Economic Intelligence and 12th for most Liveable City. The concept of liveability has a broad appeal for many Aucklanders with criteria like public transport, crime and even medical care.

But Auckland faces some real truths. How do we accommodate a growing population? How to we become a green city and reduce our carbon footprint? How do we provide affordable housing? How do we continue to create economic potential?

That is where our spatial plan renamed the “Auckland Plan” comes into play. The Auckland Plan tries to answer a few of those questions and brings together a common plan for the next 30 years. And there are aspirations within the Auckland Plan that includes providing better access to our waterfront, rail through the inner-city and the southern initiative to raise the bar in South Auckland.

However, the most controversial decision to date has been allowing 30-40% of Auckland’s population growth to be built on our green field peripheral. This will add an additional 170,000 homes, the same size as the North Shore, to be built on the city’s outskirts. Auckland is by no accounts a large city compared to the square kilometres of other international cities but the decision to expand will have significant impact on Auckland’s communities.

There is no doubt that the underlying reason for this major land use decision is the provision of affordable housing. But I ask you where does it stop?

The Auckland Council’s decision to allow one out of every three new homes over the next twenty years to be built in the quintessential Auckland urbanism will be resource and cost intensive. The lack of quality public transport in these suburban subdivisions will encourage more Aucklanders to rely on their cars. This will add to further congestion around the city and encourage the New Zealand’s Transport Authority to continue investing billions of dollars on further motorway expansion projects. The cost of these new homes will require new roads, new sewage, new schools, new hospitals, new police stations, new parks, new pools, new libraries… and the list goes on. And you have to ask yourself one simple question; how does this unscalable and unsustainable growth creating the world’s most liveable city?

Instead of divesting more than a third of the limited resources of the private and public sector, over the next twenty years, into expanding the city into green field we should be focusing on supporting our existing communities. The city is sitting on infrastructure that is underutilised, these are urban environments in community town centres that are not activated; there are currently “For Lease” signs in our key commercial centres like Parnell, Newmarket, Eden Terrace and Karagahape Road.

The idea of living in a built up area is still a foreign concept for many Auckland families who still want the large backyard and the two car garage. You don’t have to look further than Station Square in Newmarket to see the shoe box cardboard cut-out apartments or the Zest Apartment on Hobson Street that has more people living in them than the resident population on Great Barrier Island to be turned off by inner-city living.

I recently had the opportunity to visit the head of the Spatial Planning team in Munich, Germany. The city has learnt a lot from a special plan that has been in implementation since the 1960s. My key outtake from the meeting was that they had three key elements to their success:

1) Longevity and strong local leadership. It is extraordinary that Munich’s plan has been in action for 50 years and still continues to provide strong clear guidance for the cities growth. Over the years many proposals were put forward to build motorways and uplift tram tracks but community leaders and residents kept true to the plan.

2) The city has an agreed development contribution model that has paid for the soft infrastructure of the city eg. city parks, schools, libraries and affordable housing. Prior to an significant development the Munich City Council models the estimated land value gains per square meter and a third of the capital gains must be re-invested into the local area.

3) But most importantly, the key function of the Munich City Council is not to set guidelines or principles for land use or urban design. They target development sites and have a rigorous process for implementing land use and urban design.

The Auckland Unitary Plan (the new district plan) which will be launched in draft form at the end of this year will pave the way for change through regulatory process. I hope for the future of all Aucklanders that our community leaders and council staff can see the “heritage and character beyond the urban sprawl” or the “built urban design beyond the function” and make some bold decisions.

For the 72,000 inner-city residents which I represent on the Waitemata Local Board there are sweeping changes coming our way. Working alongside our resident groups and business associations, we will be acting boldly, and we will put forward our views on how the unitary plan can deliver on creating a liveable city for our communities.