No cathedral ‘wiggle room’
Christchurch city councillors were blindsided when the Christ Church Cathedral rebuild team announced it would mothball the project if it can’t find $30 million in four months.
Although Mark Stewart, chairperson of Christchurch Cathedral Reinstatement Ltd (CCRL), is hopeful the council will help them out, councillors are concerned about a lack of transparency and communication.
Several councillors said if CCRL told them how bad things were just a few weeks earlier, the council could have included an option to top up the existing $10m ratepayer contribution in its draft long-term plan (LTP). “It appears that ship has sailed,” councillor James Gough said.
Stewart said his team only made the decision last week and it would have been impossible to give the council and other stakeholders more notice. On the $30m figure and August deadline, he said “there is no wiggle room”, as they simply would not be able to afford to keep going.
CCRL announced on Saturday the cost to rebuild the earthquake-damaged church has skyrocketed from $160m to $248m, largely because the work had turned out to be much more complex than expected.
The restoration began in 2020 with $25m in funding from central government, $10m from Christchurch ratepayers, $33m from insurance proceeds, and has had $24m worth of donations.
Stewart said they were more than a third of the way through the project and he was confident they could raise $26m from New Zealand and overseas.
But by not being included in the draft LTP – if the council was to intervene – the council may need to run a special public consultation process, as councillor Sara Templeton said it did in 2017 when it was asked for a $10m grant towards the restoration. She said CCRL would likely request a lot of money from council, and told social media followers any decision needed a clear process and community feedback.
“Our heritage buildings are one thing that makes us feel at home in our changing city, but I’m really not sure how much longer we can keep focussing on rebuilding the past at enormous cost when there is so much at risk in our future and so little put in place to protect it,” she said.
However, as councillor Victoria Henstock said, it was not too late for Christchurch residents to submit to the LTP and ask the council to give CCRL a boost.
Henstock was disappointed the council wasn’t told sooner, considering the CCRL board saw the preliminary results of the project review several months ago.
Mary Richardson, the council’s interim chief executive, said she and the mayor were given a heads up about potential financial issues in March, but only learnt how bad things were on Saturday.
However, given the situation, Richardson said the council believed CCRL notified it at an appropriate time.
Richardson could not say if it was possible to give CCRL a cash injection in time for the deadline, because there were no options on the table yet. However, council chief financial officer Bede Carran would “explore options” with the group, she said.
Councillor Sam Macdonald said while it was incredibly sad news for the city, he thought the church should consider selling or divesting from existing assets to make up the shortfall.
In a statement, Bishop Peter Carrel said no assets were scheduled to be sold by August.
Although Stewart said the bishop committed $16m in additional funds from the Anglican Church, exactly where that money would come from and when it would be available was
unclear, as the synod (the representative body of the church) had yet to decide.
Meanwhile, government ministers have all but ruled out a central government cash injection into the project.
Waimakariri MP Matt Doocey – the only South Island representative in Cabinet – said he knew many Cantabrians supported returning the cathedral to its former glory, but NZ’s financial environment was challenging.
Echoing the comments of Finance Minister Nicola Willis at the weekend, he said the Government had to focus spending on education, health and other priority public infrastructure. Christ Church Cathedral was not a priority for additional taxpayer funding. He said the current cathedral could be left as-is – as a living memorial to the earthquakes, if other options failed.
The late Sir Miles Warren’s solution to rebuild the Cathedral to the original design incorporating substantial upper works timber framing and trusses with less obstructive internal pillars is the only viable cost option for the building.
A combined Catholic-Anglican cathedral on the site makes even far more sense, demonstrating a willingness to cooperate and cohesively move on. We need to get some heads together.
John Lee, Burnside