|
|||||
New Zealand Engineering 1999 March Infrastructure Strategies for Major Infrastructure Planning Despite numerous lessons from our distant and more recent past, New Zealanders still appear to fail to recognise the value and significance of long-term integrated planning for major infrastructural investment. Recent infrastructure failures (power supply, water shortages, sewerage overflows) illustrate the need for continued investment and development to cope with existing demands as well as future population growth. Don Lyon, director of planning at Beca Carter Hollings & Ferner, argues that the time has come for a regionally integrated approach to major infrastructural planning, consenting and development. Research among a number of major Beca infrastructure clients indicates their single, dominant concern about tackling infrastructural developments in any given region is the apparent lack of strategic planning and integrated management by the relevant authorities. They feel there is poor recognition of the significance of the major infrastructural issues for New Zealand’s economy and environment. And where there is any vision of integrated regional development, it has little opportunity to flourish because it gets bogged down in the day-to-day workings of the RMA consent process. Yet to lay the blame at the RMA’s door is misguided. Its application may be of concern, however. In essence, the legislation has compelled local authorities to become no more than consenting agents and demands that they focus on immediate, day-to-day issues. They rarely have the luxury of being able to step back, take a broader view of a proposed development and assess what’s in the region’s best interests. The inevitable result is an emerging vacuum in terms of strategic infrastructural planning. All of which means infrastructural projects of major significance (Project Manukau or ALPURT, for example) that have a direct bearing on a region’s ability to meet the needs of a future (expanded) population are usually assessed in a complex and ad hoc fashion. They come up against the same policies and rules which local authorities use to assess other, conventional developments: shops, subdivision, garages and factories, boat moorings, air discharges, farm ponds and septic tanks. And that’s absurd. Why should a project like the proposed Weiti River Crossing succeed in securing a positive decision on its land use designation after several years of consultation, assessment and hearings, only to be constrained by the need for perhaps 15-20 additional individual resource consents plus appeals on the designation itself? Could better environmental outcomes be achieved if the regional significance of the project was recognised early on and the Assessment of Effects process considered wider strategic mitigation options than can be recognised by a district or regional council imposing conditions on the individual consents? Treating major infrastructural investment in such a piecemeal and uncoordinated way is inappropriate. It fails to address the importance of such assets for the sustainable management and economic development of the region. The strategic regional outlook is lost. And, one suspects, it fails to deliver optimum environmental outcomes despite the best endeavours of the RMA and the various consent agencies. We are faced with a lose/lose situation which - surely - was no one’s intention. The RMA certainly did not achieve the goal of streamlining the consent process. Where developers previously had to apply for consent under multiple pieces of legislation, the RMA consolidated and reduced the application process to one Act. Yet infrastructure providers must still apply for a similar range of individual consents, but this time under the single Act. Still, the perceived constraints of the RMA are not entirely responsible for New Zealand’s poor record of infrastructural strategic planning. The Ministry for the Environment prescribes the RMA’s limits to assessment of environmental effects and the sustainable management of natural and physical resources. Infrastructure is clearly a key physical resource and there is nothing in the legislation which prevents local and regional government (or indeed private enterprise) taking a strategic and integrated approach to planning major infrastructural investment and development. Indeed, such a vital planning activity lies beyond the scope and purpose of the RMA. Arguably it should not even enter the equation until the actual and potential effects of infrastructural development need to be assessed. I am not proposing that we circumvent the consent process, but simply that it is given some coordination and that some recognition is given to the early strategic planning process. Solutions Its major difference from existing infrastructure planners would be its responsibility for taking a multi-dimensional, objective view of a region’s requirements, and it would have the power to implement its decisions. Existing regional agencies can only operate within certain parameters. Infrastructure Auckland, for example, is limited to consideration of stormwater and transportation issues. Other initiatives such as the Regional Growth Forum and the Draft Land Transport Strategy create various strategic and policy documents, but lack the teeth to implement their recommendations for the region. New Zealand needs an agency or mechanism that embodies a coordinated, strategic perspective and the power to act. Other strategies for nurturing integrated, regional planning include offshore examples. Tasmania, for example, has adopted many of the principles of New Zealand’s RMA, but in addition has included a statute known as the State Policies and Projects Act 1993. It enables the relevant Minister to declare a project to be of ‘state significance’ if it possesses at least two of the following attributes:
Once a project has been declared
of state significance, the proponent can be directed to prepare an ‘Integrated Impact
Statement’ in accordance with prescribed guidelines. The Inventory of projects All parties would recognise that once on the inventory, a project was to be treated as a special case in terms of investigation and consenting. This does not mean that the project would be fast-tracked. Rather, that it would be subjected to an ‘Integrated Impact Statement’ and a single, consenting mechanism covering land use designations and all necessary regional or local resource consents. Finally, (and as an immediate strategy) I believe regional infrastructure developments within New Zealand could achieve better environmental outcomes if consenting agencies adopted a broader view and embraced the RMA’s ‘mitigate’ option (avoid, remedy or mitigate) more enthusiastically. By their very nature, projects of regional significance will impact both positively and negatively (to varying degrees) on the environment. If that impact is inescapable, consenting authorities could employ a far wider mitigation strategy to advance other developments (parks, walkways, for example) for the region. The overall environmental outcome could be better for the region and its people. Don Lyon is the director of planning at Beca Carter Hollings & Ferner Ltd |
|||||
 |
|
|
|
