• Published date: 02 October 2022

Nothing happened. Weeks went by. Months

Eventually, the man got hold of his friend Bill Cashmore, who is the local ward councillor and deputy mayor. Cashmore asked the man to show him a copy of the application.

They’d sent it to Waikato District Council.

Cashmore tells the story as a cautionary tale. Sometimes, when you think the council has screwed you over, it might not be true at all.

I asked Phil Goff about potholes last week. There are some on his road. There are some on many roads, all over Auckland. I said I assumed they were a result of cost-cutting after COVID struck.

The council lost $900 million in revenue in 2020, because of the pandemic. They deferred a lot of work, cancelled a lot of plans, laid off a lot of staff. Funding to fix potholes was surely one of the casualties.

No, he said. The Emergency Budget the council produced in July 2020 had a limited impact on “renewals”, which is what they call maintenance and repair work. Same for the Recovery Budgets that followed. They didn’t want the existing assets of the city undermined.

The reason for the potholes on Goff’s road, he said, is that we’ve had an extremely wet winter. Parts of the road have subsided and they’re not easy to fix when the land beneath the road is still so wet.

Just one more impact of climate change: increased demand on the renewals budget.

That also happens when there’s growth, which is another reason for the holes in the roads in the rural southeast, where Goff lives. There are too many trucks.

Some are logging trucks, most are carrying aggregate from nearby quarries. According to the Aggregate and Quarry Association, it takes 25 truckloads to provide the concrete and asphalt for an average house. It takes 1400 truckloads for a single kilometre of two-lane highway.

The massively sprawling greenfields developments in the south, southeast, northwest and north of the city are part of the largest building boom in the city’s history: 47,331 dwelling consents last year alone, and every house in a new subdivision is connected by new roads.

Since the Super City was formed in 2010, Auckland has grown by 300,000 people. As Cashmore told the council on Thursday, that’s the equivalent of Hamilton and Dunedin moving to Auckland. And most of the housing growth has occurred only in the past few years.

Another thing about trucks — quarry trucks, freight trucks, all kinds of trucks: they clog up the roads. Auckland is expanding its capacity to carry freight by rail, but there’s still much to do.

Phil Goff, who is 69, says he’s going to miss being mayor of Auckland. Fair bet he’s not going to miss all of it. Congestion, especially in a growing city, is a long, slow slog of a problem to fix. We have an infrastructure deficit that extends from all forms of transport to housing, water, playing fields, schools and hospitals.

There will never be enough revenue. There will always be potholes. There will always be critics.

Goff chaired his last council meeting last week. He’s retiring, along with his deputy, Cashmore, who is 65 and also lives in the rural southeast of the city.

They both made valedictory speeches. Cashmore’s was a PowerPoint special with 103 slides on it.

Earlier in the week, I sat down with each of them, Goff in his garden with lettuces and plum blossom and lambs in the paddocks beyond, Cashmore in the blandly functional council offices in downtown Auckland, high above the city and the Waitematā.

Both had things they really wanted to say.

Cashmore told me about an angry public meeting in Drury where he spoke.

“There were 250, maybe 300 people. They’d shifted it to the school hall because the original venue was too small. It was chock-a-block.”

These were property developers, builders, locals and it was organised by the residents association.

There’s an explosion of new housing all the way from Drury to Pukekohe, thousands more jobs on the way and growing pressure on the infrastructure too...