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Sergey Salishchev / EyeEm
Sergey Salishchev / EyeEm

AucklandAugust 30, 2018

How a council email footer sparked a local government conspiracy

Sergey Salishchev / EyeEm
Sergey Salishchev / EyeEm

A rogue Auckland Council email footer has sparked a wave of angst and recriminations in the sleepy North Shore suburb Takapuna. Hayden Donnell explains footergate – and how it fits into the broader conspiracy culture in local government.

These are the facts we know about the email the lobby group Generation Zero sent out to its Auckland supporters on August 17:

  1. It implored people to oppose a plan that would see a new parking building go up in Takapuna. “A new car park isn’t the way forward,” it said. “We hope we can count on you again.”
  2. The email was seen not only by Generation Zero sympathisers, but by a trio of pro-Takapuna car park campaigners – Ruth Jackson of Heart of Takapuna, North Shore local board member Jan O’Connor, and Albany councillor Wayne Walker.
  3. At some point – and this is important – one of this trio saw a version of the email that contained, below its final full-stop, an Auckland Council email footer.

That’s when all hell broke loose.

O’Connor claims Jackson forwarded her the email with the footer attached. When she saw it, she was immediately suspicious. She was certain only elected representatives or council officers could attach a council footer to the bottom of an email. In her mind, this was evidence of something she’d believed for a long time: someone within council was helping Generation Zero distort the public feedback on the plan, which would see the Anzac St car park converted into public space and a multi-storey parking building constructed nearby.

Earlier this year, a Colmar Bruton poll showed  69% support for removing the Anzac St car park and replacing it with public space. O’Connor never believed the result. She thought someone was trying to make it look like the community was in favour of getting rid of the car park. Now she had evidence. She immediately had one name on her mind: anti-car-park councillor Richard Hills. “There’s a rat smelling. I’ve been around since 1986 in politics and I’ve never smelt this rat before,” she told me in a rambling 30-minute phone call. “Never, never, never have I smelt anything as bad as what I’m smelling now.”

Word spread quickly among the pro-car-park campaigners. They saw the email footer as evidence of a wider plot by council developers Panuku, Generation Zero, and other apartment advocates to develop the Takapuna car park. Jackson and O’Connor were joined by Wayne Walker, an ostensibly left-wing councillor who spends a lot of time advocating for low-efficiency highways and opposing housing for lower-income buyers. He decided to raise the matter of the email footer in a meeting of the council’s planning committee. The conspiracy had gone all the way to the top.

Walker told me he had to raise the email, because it raised the spectre of a council insider gaming the consultation process in Takapuna. “This was somebody who knew how the system works – all the buttons to push – and look now, that’s a real concern,” he said. “If it’s an officer it’s a real concern. If it’s an elected member it’s a real concern. If it’s a mixture of both those, it’s a real concern. That’s the sort of thing that would cause many councillors and the mayor to come down on councillors like a tonne of bricks.”

Hills gave me a briefer statement on the matter: “This is all a ridiculous conspiracy theory.”

He’s right. This episode followed a similar trajectory to many of the issues that come up in local council. What started out as a routine debate over planning blossomed into a full-scale menagerie of hysteria, misinformation and conspiracy theorising.

The email footer was amalgamated into a wider belief in shadowy forces lining up to thwart people’s full-throated democratic demands to keep a terrible car park in the centre of a growing town centre. In my interviews with them, both O’Connor and Walker raised the possibility that the council’s development wing Panuku, Generation Zero, and other forces had worked together to rig the vote on two rounds of consultation that showed 69% and 55% support for removing the Anzac St carpark, respectively, but their accusations against Generation Zero and Panuku in particular were many and varied.

PRO-CAR-PARK ACTIVISTS EXPLAIN THE COUNCIL PLOT AGAINST THEM.

Their willingness to peddle misinformation and deliver dire pronouncements about shadowy council plots is in line with a wider culture in local government. Recently, Kevin Clark of the Northcote Residents Association warned of “human crushes” once SkyPath is built, mining his fevered imagination to envision a scenario where hordes of panicked cyclists are driven into the sea.

Lisa Prager, who led a revolt against a cycleway development in Grey Lynn and helped oppose public transport improvements in Mt Eden, believes The Spinoff, Generation Zero, and the advocacy group Greater Auckland are trying to enact “Agenda 21” – something that in reality is a set of United Nations resolutions about sustainability, but in the minds of conspiracy theorists are actually part of a plot to rob people and countries of their liberty through cycleways.

Even the comparatively rational Public Transport Users Association accuses Greater Auckland of puppet mastering the government because it refuses to back a train line out to Huapai.

It’s funny, and it’s not. I can’t count the number of bizarre theories I’ve heard in 11 years of attending council meetings. The loudest voices talking to council are often the most resistant to facts; the most vulnerable to fantasy. It’s not that worrying – mostly these people are dismissed as kooks – until actual councillors like Walker not only to hear them out, but advance their cause.

Generation Zero spokesman Leroy Beckett edited the email that launched footergate. He spent a few panicked moments scouring his email account after getting a call from a Stuff journalist about Walker’s in-council accusations, but denies ever attaching a council footer to his email. He also denies being part of an anti-car-park conspiracy involving Panuku, council and councillors on the North Shore. “We got no help from Auckland Council. We’ve met with Panuku before because we are stakeholders. I’ve talked to councillors in the area because we care about this development. I do my job. What have I done wrong?”

Beckett said few people are truly passionate about local government, and the ones who are often end up becoming disconnected from reality – leading to incidents like this one. “There’s not a lot of coverage of [local government]. It’s not a thing most people know a lot about. So the people who really do get down a rabbit hole with it become really obsessive about it.” In other words, too much local government can poison the mind.

At the end of the interview with Beckett, I realised I’d signed up to a Generation Zero mailing list at some point, and may have received the email in question. I found it in my promotions folder, unread. There was no Auckland Council footer at the bottom. O’Connor, Walker, or another pro-car-park councillor most likely accidentally added it when they forwarded the email to each other.

JAN O’CONNOR’S EMAIL SIGNATURE

All that fuss – all those accusations – over something that never even existed.

Keep going!
Artist’s impression of the proposed apartment development at the corner of Dominion Road and Valley Road, Auckland (supplied)
Artist’s impression of the proposed apartment development at the corner of Dominion Road and Valley Road, Auckland (supplied)

AucklandAugust 30, 2018

This ludicrous Dominion Road decision is proof the planning system is broken

Artist’s impression of the proposed apartment development at the corner of Dominion Road and Valley Road, Auckland (supplied)
Artist’s impression of the proposed apartment development at the corner of Dominion Road and Valley Road, Auckland (supplied)

The objections of a few wealthy Mt Eden residents have succeeded in killing a much-needed central Auckland housing development. How does this keep happening?

Dominion Road has been marked for major transformation with over a billion dollars to be invested in high capacity light rail that will traverse the length of Auckland’s most famous street. To take advantage of this transformation and to assist in the rejuvenation of this somewhat rundown area Auckland Council’s development arm Panuku had planned to develop 102 apartment units in four to five storey buildings in the Valley Road centre.

Remarkably a panel of independent commissioners has just refused resource consent for this much needed housing development citing the scale and intensity of the development as being out of character with the surrounding neighbourhood.

The development

Panuku was established by Auckland Council to promote urban redevelopment, with the aim of rejuvenating neglected areas while accommodating the city’s rapid growth. Panuku identified a redevelopment opportunity on a large council-owned site cornering Dominion and Valley Roads. They planned to build 102 apartments in four buildings. The buildings would generally be four storeys along the site boundaries, though two of the buildings would have a fifth storey setback towards the centre of the site. Resource consent was lodged and hearings were held to hear objections.

Artist’s impression of the proposed apartment development at the corner of Dominion Road and Valley Road, Auckland (supplied)

The objectors

A number of nearby residents objected to the development. One was the late prime minister David Lange’s brother, Peter. He raised concerns about the effect the development would have on “amenity”. The resource consent decision report describes the impact homes for other people to live in would have on Peter Lange:

“He described the pleasure of sitting in his front bedroom or balcony and enjoying ‘the sunsets across the silhouetted parapets of the Edwardian shop fronts, to the Waitakeres beyond.’ He considered the imposition of a five storey building would seriously compromise this amenity.”

Another issue raised by objectors was the effect of the development on heritage. The development would involve the demolition of a single post-war modified building which the council’s heritage specialist Rebecca Fogel described not as a character building itself, but “character supporting”. Fogel stated that this building makes a “moderate contribution to the street” and therefore should not be demolished, but said there was no reason that Panuku couldn’t incorporate the building into the development. However, Panuku objected, saying that keeping the building would be unworkable and would require considerable spending on seismic upgrading.

The current building on Dominion Road / Valley Road site

The decision

The hearing commissioners ultimately refused the application for the Dominion Road development. They provided the following reasoning:

“The excess height and associated bulk and form of the proposal will result in adverse visual, shading and dominance effects on the character and amenity of the surrounding neighbourhood….

“While the proposed mixed use development will provide many positive benefits including additional housing opportunities on a major transport route and new retail opportunities in the Eden Valley local business centre, the adverse effects of the proposal, particularly the bulk, dominance and shading and the loss of the Universal Buildings will mean that any social and economic wellbeing benefits to the community that could arise from the proposal would be outweighed by its dis-benefits.”

The commissioners provided a superficial analysis that leaned heavily on the fact that development would breach some of the rules of the Unitary Plan. This is a somewhat circular argument considering that nearly all resource consent applications involve breaches of planning rules. Decision makers are supposed to assess applications based on their tangible effects on the environment, not on their effect on the planning rules themselves.

It is true that the Unitary Plan does provide relatively low intensity zoning in this area. But this zoning was largely the result of an arbitrary political process which pushed high intensity zoning to outer suburbs to ensure that the wealthy citizens of the leafy inner burbs wouldn’t have to endure people living near them. The resulting zoning pattern forms a donut of density in outer suburbs contra to the compact city principles of the Auckland Plan and Unitary Plan.

The commissioners barely mention the Dominion Road development’s contribution to housing. They make no mention of the transformation light rail will bring to the area. They make no mention of Auckland’s rapid growth, and barely mention the higher level objectives of the Unitary Plan which was originally premised on limiting sprawl and growing the city through intensification of centres and public transport corridors. They even went so far as to be dismissive of the applicants for mentioning these higher level objectives:

“We consider that the applicant’s experts have placed too high a reliance on the higher level RPS (Regional Policy Statement) urban growth and form objectives and policies of the AUP (Auckland Unitary Plan)”.

Even more remarkably the commissioners refused to consider the likely future changes in the surrounding area when deciding what forms part of the background, or “receiving environment”, for which to measure “adverse effects” against:

“We have therefore adopted a precautionary approach in our consideration of the evidence in this regard, and apply our discretion not to adopt possible future building forms as a primary mitigation feature for the mitigation of adverse effects”

The refusal of resource consent for this development is a decision that places the preservation of the existing form of this area as a value that overrides all else.

A ratepayers meeting at St Heliers Community Centre, August 2016. during the heyday of the Unitary Plan debate. Photo: Hayden Donnell

The planning system is broken

We have a housing crisis because a generation of boomers think stopping homes from being built is as righteous now as stopping apartheid was in the 80s.

We have a housing crisis because zoning decisions get made on the basis of which areas have the fewest rich people in them.

We have a housing crisis because the system for approving development places more value in the peaceful ambience of cocktail hour at the Lange household that it does in providing desperately needed homes for people.

Few sites are as well suited to urban intensification as this one on Dominion Road. It is close to the CBD. It is on one of the city’s busiest bus routes. It is about to have hundreds of millions of dollars invested in light rail. If the homes Auckland so desperately needs can’t be built here, then where can they?

And if the current planning system does not allow houses to be built in the places where it makes most sense then the system needs to change. Areas like the Dominion Road corridor need a much broader presumption that they will be developed for intensive housing. If the Labour-led government is to meet its goals of easing the housing shortage and making the most of its investment in light rail then it needs to step in to ensure this can happen.

But wait there's more!