Takapuna disgrace spells urgency

Pollution on Takapuna beach on New Year’s Day is surely the ultimate disgrace for Auckland’s negligent local government. Takapuna is in many ways Auckland’s most prominent beach, a long, beautiful sweep of sand below the civic centre of the North Shore looking across to Rangitoto. Yet when rain arrived on Monday, a stormwater drain flowed into the water where people were swimming. Lifeguards thought it best to close the beach.

In an article for the Herald yesterday Mayor Phil Goff pronounced beach pollution “not acceptable” and claimed he had a plan to fix the problem. The Auckland Council has set up a “safeswim” website giving daily assessments of beaches throughout the region.

After Monday’s incident, Takapuna was by no means the only beach red-flagged on the website as “high risk”. Many of the East Coast Bays and western isthmus beaches were in the same category. A few on the isthmus and Manukau harbour were worse, marked “long term alert”.

Normally it is not until winter rainfall has set in that beach warnings remind us of the disgusting state of Auckland’s drainage. The fact that an overflow such as this can happen in a summer such as this, in almost the first daylight downfall after a dry spell of two months, suggests the state of the drains is even worse than we knew.

Sewers were supposed to have been sealed off from stormwater drains decades ago. The former Auckland City Council often talked about wastewater separation but for some reason, it was not done. Instead of a gradual separation programme, the problem is now to be solved by a central interceptor tunnel from Western Springs to Mangere that will take seven years to construct. The scale of the project is said to be comparable to the Waterview road tunnel. It is to be financed from water rates by the region’s freshwater supplier, Watercare Services.

In addition to the sewage overflow interceptor, the council has a stormwater drainage improvement project that will involve separating stormwater and wastewater house by house in some places.

The disgrace of New Year’s Day should help the Mayor and his council convince the region’s ratepayers a targeted rate for this project is needed.

A 10-year council budget to be issued for consultation in March will ask households to pay an additional $1.30 a week to improve the region’s water quality. It seems well worth it. The bays of the western isthmus suffer wastewater overflows between 25 and 60 times a year.

Goff was elected on a promise to restrict rate increases to 2.5 per cent a year. To get around that promise and deal with the demands of Auckland’s rapid population growth he is proposing to levy a petrol tax as well as the targeted rate for drainage. He ought to be forgiven the additional rates so long as they are used strictly for their stated purpose. Petrol tax revenue ought to go entirely to improving transport services, a targeted rate for drainage ought to be clearly flagged for those projects. Those unfortunate to be swimming at Takapuna on Monday could see the work is needed, urgently.