I’ve got an idea. Instead of electing 16 councillors from across the political spectrum, let’s donate their $120k salaries to the City Mission. It’s low compo for their putting up with each other on the Wellington City Council. Probably doesn’t pay for their therapists or addiction services and better they use the Mission’s. Plus it is too tough to be expected to read 4,200 WCC-produced pages within seven days of a critical vote on demolishing the City to Sea Bridge (and adopting the “draft” plan already adopted by a fourth-tier WCC manager).

Let’s just tender the design and running of our billion-dollar ratepayer/debt funded “investments” to Fulton Hogan and Warren and Mahoney. Cut out the WCC middlemen/women/people who produce a lot of verbiage and double/triple handle the requests for service and produce reams of reports on what’s already been decided.

We should have been alerted to the impending Te Ngakau Civic Square debacle in August by the “Build Back Better” fervour of Warren and Mahoney’s press release. It was reprinted and expanded in The Post, though not marked “opinion” or “advertorial”.

If I read once again that we are to be “thriving” or to “live work and play in a city we’re proud to call home”, or that “50-80,000 people” will be joining us, I’ll join the old ladies with secateurs who are currently flooding city councillors’ mailboxes about plans to demolish the Begonia House. Not to mention mature architects and art historians grateful to the judiciary for postponing action to chain themselves to the City to Sea Bridge.

The city council does an awful lot of “envisaging.” My favorites until recently were the new rapid trams sweeping down from Melrose past the zoo (never imagined to go there by GWRC or Let’s Get Wellington Moving). And the trams outside the railway station and sweeping past the hospital.

Each had lovely slender young people wearing sleeveless dresses with great hair pushing strollers containing the “future generations”. My own “lived experience” is it’s so cold and windy this December “summer”, that the leaves have fallen off my Elm. The few tamariki in strollers are inside the Begonia House, or by the duck pond in the (at risk) Botanic Garden.

The Post reports that the WCC person in charge of overseeing the remake of Te Ngakau/Civic Square, Farzad Zamani (he gave us the choice of “demolition or demolition” for the bridge), is the 34th most powerful person in the whole city, but works with little scrutiny and is “said to dislike any vestiges of Wellington’s colonial past”. I recall Jill Day (current President of the Labour Party) when she was a WCC councillor calling for the rose garden to be pulled up because it was “colonial”.

The Civic Square designers are led by Warren and Mahoney and include Simon Hardy and Claire Sharpe, together with ex long-time WCC employee, now contractor, Anna Harley. She’s never liked the bridge. We get an insight into their “vision” for Wellington (sorry Poneke/Port Nicolson):

My Future Capital: As I open my euphoric city pad window, the sounds of my city can envelope me. I choose when to engage with my community, to nourish my adventurous spirit, or when to shut up shop and watch my city from afar. Before me is a city transforming into a thriving, vibrant, and sustainable city, underpinned by a holistic planning approach …

Actual lived experience of the city involves litigation not only about the bridge but also about the “enveloping” aircraft noise, and drug-fueled party bars, and too many shut-up shops with more at risk on the Golden Mile. The WCC clearly shares Simon and Claire’s desire to choose “when to engage with my community”.

Simon and Claire say..

[WAM is] creating a city that is not only moving with ease, but also a place to thrive and a beacon of innovation and sustainability. We have embraced this opportunity and see not a city that is “dying”, but Wellingtonians that are thriving.

Exactly like the big shots in “Vision for Wellington”?

While I hunt for my secateurs, can someone tell me what opening my “euphoric city pad window” will show me, if it’s not a reference to a “Bishbox” sized apartment window (now that balconies and private outdoor space are no longer encouraged by planning laws)?

My new favorite “envisaging” is the WAM team’s picture where six lanes of traffic are artfully concealed behind trees, while pedestrians meander across a miraculously traffic-free road where there was once a lovely safe bridge. Have I seen the WAM renderings somewhere else in their global “Build Back Better” archive? WAM’s vision for Tauranga maybe? At least sleeveless dresses and no wind look suitable in those same pictures.

Footnote. If Mr Zamani wants to demolish a bridge, he should be focussing on this one between a car park that’s been closed for years and the Michael Fowler Centre. No redeeming features. Was he thinking of the wrong bridge?

by Felicity Wong