City Plan spells out essential projects

April 8, 2009

_Each year local authorities have to prepare an Annual Plan - and every three years the council is also required to prepare a ten year plan – the City Plan. North Shore City Council is the first local authority in New Zealand to prepare a 15 year plan.

A part of the process is to provide opportunities for citizens to provide feedback to the council as to what they think of the Draft Plan.

We invite you to come along and meet your councillors and community board members to find out more about the key issues and challenges facing your city and covered in the draft plan.

The meeting will be held on Thursday, April 16 from 4 to 8pm at Level 3, Chelsea Bay Lounge, Rawene Community Centre, 33 Rawene Rd, Birkenhead.

Much of the work the council does is in protection of the environment. Project CARE is a long term project to establish and meet the community's beach water quality expectations. It involves the continual upgrading, renewal and expansion of wastewater and stormwater systems and aims to achieve a design target of two wet weather overflow events per year.

It has already made considerable progress toward that target. The programme of work finished over the past few years is a remarkable achievement.

Key projects include the Browns Bay Storage Tunnel; the Silverfield and Kahika storage tanks; the Oteha Valley trunk sewer and the Wairau trunk sewer upgrades; the Northboro storage tunnel and the Seaview pumping station in Milford.

Overflow frequencies in those catchments have been reduced, but other areas remain problematic and there is a need to complete the programme to meet the wet weather overflow performance target in future.

Currently about 50 per cent of the beach areas have overflows that meet the target, and the programme has recently been updated to ensure the target can be met in 2021.

A total of $303 million is required to complete the programme. This amount has been affected by high cost escalation with costs of this type of work almost doubling over the last 8-10 years with rapidly increasing labour and material costs and improved work standards and practices.

The largest construction project ever undertaken by the city is indirectly a part of the Project CARE programme. The $116 million tunnel and outfall will take high quality treated effluent from the Rosedale ponds 2.8 kilometres out into the Rangitoto Channel. The outfall is due for completion around the middle of next year and will replace a nearly 50 year old smaller capacity and shorter outfall which is close to the end of its life.

ENDS

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