Clock ticks on quake repairs
Wellington City Council wants to chop years off earthquake strengthening times for about 200 buildings as officials get nervous about the sluggish pace of earthquake repairs.
It comes on the heels of a new push by city officials to contact landlords moving slowly on requests to tackle earthquake strengthening.
At present, building owners do not need to communicate with the council until earthquake strengthening deadlines have passed – something the local body wanted to change.
Council chief executive Kevin Lavery told a select committee the council did not have enough power to address public safety concerns, a view shared by Mike Mendonca, the chief resilience officer.
Mendonca said: ‘‘There are a couple where we are a little bit worried that they’ve been a bit slow.’’
Councillor Iona Pannett said the city’s officers were ‘‘frustrated’’ trying to push through the necessary strengthening work, saying landlords had ‘‘the right not to do anything’’ under current legislation. Pannett pointed to the owners
of Courtenay Central as examples of responsible landlords – they communicated with the council as soon as the issues that forced its closure last month arose.
‘‘Reading [Cinema] behaved in a responsible manner. They, literally, were meeting with us every day at times to talk with us,’’ Pannett said.
Earthquake-strengthening timeframes would be shortened to 71⁄2 years if a request from Wellington City Council officers was pushed through at central government level.
Landlords needed to be compelled to hand over information and fix faults, Lavery told the council’s transport and infrastructure committee last October. He said those powers needed to extend beyond the buildings defined as earthquake-prone.
One landlord didn’t respond to information requests on a structural issue for five years, but Lavery told the committee that even after they replied, the public safety issue wasn’t resolved because ‘‘council did not have the power to require them to address any issues’’.
Mendonca said the changes were about protecting buildings from ‘‘partial collapse’’ in some cases or the ‘‘partial failure’’ of floors.
But he said it was important to note Wellington was ‘‘worldleading’’ in its approach to earthquake strengthening.