More confusion over airport seawall funding?
Six weeks after Wellington City councillors nixed plans to loan Wellington International Airport $76 million to upgrade its crumbling western seawall, the airport has told councillors that it actually wanted a ‘‘grant’’.
The council had previously agreed to loan the airport the sum. But, on March 4, confusion over what the money would be used for led to councillors removing the loan from the council’s draft 10-year plan.
While the airport said the money would be spent on the seawall project, councillors believed, based on an email they received from the airport, that some of it would be put towards a $350m runway extension to accommodate long-haul flights from Asia and North America.
Concerned that the runway extension flew in the face of the council’s climate emergency declaration, and its goal to reduce emissions produced in Wellington City to zero by 2050, councillor Tamatha Paul called for the loan to be scrapped. Seven other councillors supported the amendment to the council’s budget, while seven voted against it.
The decision left airport chief executive Steve Sanderson ‘‘mystified’’. However, the airport was confident it could change councillors’ minds. In a bid to do just that, some of the organisation’s top brass met with councillors yesterday to make their case.
During the hour-long meeting, Sanderson said several times the money would only be used for the seawall project, which was estimated to cost $200m in total, and that the runway extension was ‘‘on hold’’.
Nick Petkov, an engineer who is in charge of airfield development, said the current seawall, which is 70 years old, was ‘‘only good until the next southerly storm’’ and needed to be rebuilt because repairing it was ‘‘like putting a bandaid on a bandaid’’.
While the seawall had been built to withstand waves up 5.3 metres high, taking into account rising sea levels caused by climate change, it needed to be able to weather waves nearly twice that size – up to 9.3m.
Petkov said modelling showed a major earthquake could cause the seawall, as well as the infrastructure it was protecting, to ‘‘simply slide into Lyall Bay’’. That would be ‘‘catastrophic’’, since a sewerage pipe taking much of the city’s sewage to the western treatment plant runs along the foreshore.
Deputy mayor Sarah Free, who voted in favour of scrapping the loan, asked why the airport was asking the council for a loan, considering that as an airport shareholder the council was effectively already footing some of the bill.
In response, Sanderson said if the council didn’t provide funding, the airport would have to pass on more of the cost for protecting council-owned roads and sewerage to airlines through the fees they pay to land there. That would then be passed on to customers through increased ticket prices.
It was then revealed to councillors that the airport would have ‘‘preferred’’ a grant, rather than a loan.