There Is No Alternative - Wellington Council edition

It looks like Wellington Council officials are providing councilors with an offer they're not supposed to refuse.

Earlier this week, Council heard a presentation from officials on options around the Town Hall. 

As presented, there seemed no reasonable alternative to spending another $70 million to $147 million to finish strengthening works. 

Stopping works and closing the building off would only save $60 million relative to finishing. Demolishing it would cost $20m less than finishing it. And delaying would just escalate costs. 

If you look at it that way, why wouldn't you finish the thing? Sunk costs are sunk, and the choice before Council is whether to spend a small bit more to finish the project rather than aim for demolition. 

And especially when officials put a lot of time pressure on the thing, wanting a decision by next Wednesday.

But there are a few oddities in there. 

Closing up the building would have a year's worth of work finishing the basement to prevent flooding, completing critical structural works, reinstating heritage fabric and the like. Safety and other works like that are $33.42 million. 

Demolition would add $39.35m on top of close-up costs: Environment Court applications, demolition planning and works, professional fees and contingencies. 

But why would you complete critical structural works or finish the basement if you were going to bowl the thing? If they netted those costs out somewhere, it sure isn't mentioned. The only reason to finish the basement rather than fill it is if you were planning to sell the site for someone else to build on, and you'd only do that if the value added by finishing were more than the cost right?

Delisting the building from the District Plan (heritage buildings are protected because they're there listed) would open up a lot of options. 

But officials caution that if a delisting process started now, it could be in the courts until December 2027. And Council could easily lose. There is insanity in the rules around this stuff, but the rules are the rules. 

Officials noted that a Local Bill might allow faster delisting - but wind up warning against that too. 

It's pretty easy to imagine what an enabling Local Bill would look like. 

It would enable council to delist buildings by simple majority vote, without right of appeal. A delisted building would be deemed to have no special value, heritage, cultural or otherwise, when considering building or demolition consents.

With an enabling local bill in place, council could weigh up different options. 

A local bill enabling delisting could do a lot of derisking. If it turns out that preserving one bit that nobody would ever notice would add $20 million to the cost, they could just save the $20 million. They could weigh things up on a case by case basis without worrying about being sued. 

The council document notes that council carries the majority of the geotech and heritage risks. The geotech side is largely now understood, but paragraph 24 still has "heritage restoration costs and requirements" as one of the remaining risks council faces. At para 26 they note that heritage risk replaces ground risk when restoration work starts. 

But officials also suggest the local bill path is impracticable:

Pathway 3: Local Bill

95. Aside from a successful plan change, the only other path to demolition is to seek to

pass a Local Bill specifically for this purpose. This would then override the District Plan

and general RMA provisions.

96. A Council decision to demolish the building under an enabling Act could still be subject to judicial review challenging the lawfulness of demolition. Any Bill would need to be drafted in such a way as to leave no room for ambiguity in interpretation on this point.

As with the other pathways discussed, the Council would need to consider the significant precedent effects in pursuing this option, including that, in practice, a Local Bill is an option available to the Council but, unlike a resource consent, not necessarily one that could be pursued by other building owners.

97. Pursuing a Local Bill would be subject to similarly high levels of uncertainty as a resource consent and/or plan change process. The local MP would be required to manage the Bill through Parliament and Council would be required to draft the Bill and meet all associated legal costs. The Bill would need support from a majority of MPs to be passed and it may take several years from introduction of the Bill before it is passed into law. It would also be subject to public debate through that process. As an example, the Girl Guides Association (New Zealand Branch) Incorporation Bill is a private bill that was introduced in February 2021, and has still not had its second reading two-and-a-half years later.

This still feels like There Is No Alternative framing. 

Local Bills are fast. Rotorua's local bill was at Select Committee within two weeks of being introduced; it was there shot down. The Girl Guides bill is a private bill.

If an incoming government has had a gutsful of Wellington spending piles of money on things that aren't the water pipes, it may well be inclined to ensure speedy treatment of the Bill, so it gets through the Committee stages reasonably quickly. 

Worst for an incoming government would be Wellington Council being able to credibly say, 

"Look, we tried our best not to have to spend another hundred million dollars on this damned building, and likely another half billion yet to come on Opera House and Fowler Centre. And who knows what down the track. 

But we are entirely tied up by central government legislation. 

Priority buildings in Wellington have to have works or demolition completed within 7.5 years of being notified. 

Our officials tell us that if we started today to try to delist the Town Hall, we might have a decision out of Environment Court by December 2026 and up to another year for High Court appeal. That's four years of legal process. 

And the clock is already ticking on Fowler and Town Hall. If we started normal legal processes this year to delist the buildings and untie our hands, we'd have less than four years* to actually do the works on them afterwards.

We asked a red-tape-hating government to let us make the choices that were right for our community, and they forced us to waste hundreds of millions of dollars instead."

* If those are priority buildings as well; it's 15 years all-up if they are not. I have no clue which buildings get a priority label. If it's based on risk to others, Opera House seems riskier than Fowler. 

It would seem more surprising if central government knocked this back rather than supporting it, really. 

A few bottom lines then:

• Wellington Council likes to pretend that it has no choice but to spend an extra hundred million or so on this building, and who knows how much more on buildings yet to come. But there is a potential choice. Wellington Council could support a Local Bill that would enable council to delist buildings and proceed on more rational basis. 
• Regardless of whether they think an incoming government would support a local bill, Wellington Council should put one up. If central government says no, Wellington Council could more plausibly ask for help in dealing with the cost consequences of loopy central government regulations. 
• Central government is in a caretaker mode now, but when it starts up again, it should say yes to a local bill while starting to think about entirely redoing how heritage amenities are supported. The current regulatory framework is utterly unfit for purpose. It imposes massive cost on owners of buildings but little financial support. It just doesn't work. Flipping the system to ditch the regulatory restrictions while providing payments to the owners of buildings for continued provision of heritage amenities would allow greater real support for a smaller number of valuable buildings worth supporting.