New Zealand Engineering 1999 March

Feature - A Millennium Event -
The America's Cup Village

by Peter King

Long time coming
The site
Design aims
Mudcrete
Main attraction

For New York City, Fremantle, or San Diego the defence of the America’s Cup was just a famous yacht race, but for Auckland, New Zealand’s City of Sails, the America’s Cup defence, to be held from 16 October 1999 until 9 March 2000, is a millennium event which will play a major role in reshaping the city centre itself. Peter King visited a village in the making.

Even as the champagne corks popped and the flashbulbs flickered the commodore of the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron was turning his mind to the task of hosting the defence of the next America’s Cup series. For back in 1995, Peter Hay, the commodore fortunate enough to be in office in the year the Squadron brought home the Auld Mug, was also Peter Hay, executive director of Beca Carter Hollings & Ferner, an engineer who had long held a belief that Auckland as a city was not sufficiently in touch with its primary asset - the Waitemata Harbour.

Most of the world’s cities have already been through a period of recovery of their pre-container wharf zones to allow development of and public access to the sea. Even in New Zealand Christchurch’s port satellite of Lyttelton has become a pleasant seaside suburb and the capital, Wellington, has enjoyed an ever-growing integration of seaside parks with its central business district. By contrast Auckland, which has a harbour every bit as pretty as Sydney’s, has had its central business district fenced off from the sea by busy Fanshawe and Quay Streets and its own very successful and commercially significant port.

Peter Hay sets the scene.

Long time coming
"During the 1987 attempt there was a lot of speculation on waterfront property when people thought we had a chance to bring the Cup home, but of course until the October crash there was a lot of speculation about almost everything. There was a bit of activity with Michael Fay’s 1992 big boat challenge off San Diego but by 1995 everything was much quieter.

" I know we came in for a lot of criticism when we announced that the challenge would not begin until 1999-2000. Some seemed to think we were trying to hold on to the Cup as long as we could, but I was pretty sure that we would need that time in order to develop the infrastructure we’d need to host the thing properly, and that turned out to be right," he says.

The Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron, of which Mr Hay is now just an ordinary member, is only responsible for hosting the America’s Cup races themselves. It has no commercial risk in the Cup defence and therefore takes no commercial reward. Indeed who exactly was going to take on the commercial risk of the Cup defence was, for a while after the Cup was won, something of a problem. Team New Zealand and the Ports of Auckland initially began to develop plans for a Cup Village outside of Auckland city. In the meantime Auckland City Council was sponsoring investigation of the Viaduct Basin site. The Ports of Auckland plans foundered on the financial risks of staging such an event. So in November 1995 Ports of Auckland, the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron and Team New Zealand approached the Auckland Regional Services Trust (the body which was formed to act as the public shareholder when the Ports of Auckland and the municipal electricity company were floated) to take on the risk. The Trust was only prepared to take on such a development of the Cup Village provided there was an on-going benefit to Auckland. This, however, required a change to the Local Government Act which was duly introduced on 21 March 1996 and passed after select committee hearing on 24 June 1996. On 25 March 1996 the Trust advertised for interested parties to register their interest in the infrastructure for the Cup. The ads netted 57 proposals, four were assessed by their consultants (Beca). Mr Hay recalls the work.

"In San Diego the syndicates had been strung out all over the place and it wasn’t the most satisfactory arrangement. From the beginning it had been decided to have the event in one place. There were potential sites closer to the race course but they were further away from accommodation and the city centre. If Auckland was going to get the tourism and other benefits of staging the Cup defence it made sense for the Cup village to be as close to the city as possible."

On 9 May 1996 the Trust announced that the Viaduct Basin was its preferred option.

The site
Take a look at any map of the Auckland CBD and the Viaduct Basin is the westernmost feature of the old port tucked under the arm of the oil terminal which juts north. It traces its history back to plans to use it as a lighter basin where smaller ships could be used to transfer cargo. It also included a log farm and the outer wharf is still, for the moment, home to a number of fishing vessels. As an area, however, it was safe to say that it was "between functions". The harbour was silted up to the point that some parts were no more than 30 cm deep at low tide and the Ports of Auckland’s main interest had years ago drifted to the east where the Fergusson Container Terminal was being expanded.

It would be wrong to imagine that the Amex New Zealand Cup Village was born without considerable pain and shouting. Although the Government chipped in $10 million (plus goods and services tax) there had been plenty of debate about the development and not surprisingly the resource consent process involved plenty of negotiation. Eventually despite a fast-track consent process three appeals to the Environment Court were made but it was not until, after a lot of protracted negotiation, 25 February 1997 that the last appeal was withdrawn.

On 12 February 1997, following an open book tender, the Auckland Regional Services Trust awarded the contract to build the America’s Cup facilities to Fletcher Construction South Pacific Ltd for $80 million. One of the conditions of the contract was that Beca Carter were mandated as the designers - largely because they had a long track record with the Ports of Auckland in the area and had designed the Whitbread Around the World marina (also in the Viaduct harbour).

Construction officially began on 1 May 1997 and officially ended four months ahead of schedule in December of last year. In the meantime the Auckland Regional Services Trust (now called Infrastructure Auckland) established a local authority trading enterprise (Late) called America’s Cup Village Ltd on 3 June 1997. This took over the operations and leased the land and harbour on which the various challenging and defending syndicates will base themselves. ACVL has sold the naming rights to American Express so the village is now called the American Express New Zealand Cup Village, or Amex New Zealand Cup Village for short.

Design aims
The broad design for the Village had been decided before the tender for the job was let. It basically involved the demolishing of the old straight western viaduct wharf to make a wider dogleg wharf projecting out into the harbour. In the middle of this expanded harbour would be placed a corporate hospitality island offering the best views of the syndicate bases. Of enormous commercial significance to the Village company are the berths offered for superyachts coming out for the Cup challenge series.

Amex New Zealand Cup Village communications manager Sue Foley explains.

"Our key aim is to break even. Our revenue comes from renting out the syndicate bases and superyacht berthage. Superyachts are typically over 30 metres long and can have up to a dozen crew. Our prices will be competitive with Monaco and the south of France where deposits are about $35,000. We’re almost fully booked with some quite spectacular yachts due to come. Netscape founder James Clark is bringing out Hyperion from San Francisco and that clears the Golden Gate bridge by just 10 metres. It’s certainly going to be the largest ever gathering of superyachts in the southern hemisphere."

For the engineers building and designing the Village site there were a few interesting twists. Because the project was a design-build contract and was subject to significant liquidated damages the Beca design team headed by David Carter found itself designing to optimise construction time for Fletcher Construction’s Daniel Makareth (also an engineer).

"We had a schedule of design packages which had been established before the contract start. Typically the packages would arrive on a Friday and we’d read them over the weekend. Then we’d have a meeting on the Monday to discuss any issues we had with them and either send them back to the designers for change or start building to them," Mr Makareth says. "The whole relationship with the Beca’s guys worked really well, as it did with Woodward-Clyde who were the client’s building consent consultants."

Although the schedule and liquidated damages put pressure on the Beca design team Mr Carter agrees the process went well and taught some interesting lessons.

"Normally in a project where the design phase precedes the construction contract you tend to design to reduce the material costs of construction. In this case that didn’t matter so much to the client as the construction time needed to put the design into effect. Time is money and the client wouldn’t thank us for saving materials costs but costing time," says Mr Carter.

Another lesson was learned in communication.

"Normally you tend to put a young graduate on site to keep their eyes open and bring back any queries to the senior design team. We assigned Niksa Sardelic, one of the lead designers on the project to the site. While the client at first queried why we were putting one of our more expensive people in that role it soon proved to be cost effective because no time was wasted communicating with the design team. Niksa could handle most queries on the spot."

Mudcrete
From a design point of view the America’s Cup harbour had two interesting features, both of which related to silt. The Viaduct Harbour site was heavily silted and to create a channel for the competitor boats and superyachts 4.5-5 metres below chart datum (lowest tide) involved dredging 100,000 m3 of marine mud and 200,000 m3 of sandstone. The only problem was that the marine mud contained various heavy metals including copper, lead, mercury, chromium and zinc as well as traces of chlordane, DDT and tributyl tin. The project did not need hold-ups while consents were gained to dump this material somewhere else.

The solution was mudcrete, a mixture of 100 kg of Portland cement to every cubic metre of mud, which was used to build the island and fill the reclamation parts of the project. With a sheer strength of 400 kPa after 28 days (250 kPa after seven) mudcrete provided an excellent base for building, and environmental monitoring confirmed the expectation that the material locked up the contaminants in the mud. Although silting around the Auckland harbour area has been measured at no more than 2.5 cm per year it was important that the harbour maintained the flushing action of tides and waves while protecting expensive vessels moored in close quarters. The piles of the wharf had been designed and cast with a slot to accommodate wave panels to present a continual wall to the sea but to facilitate the flushing action of the water the panels were instead bolted in an alternating fashion on the inside and outside of the piles to baffle the waves but not resist them.

Although the actual Harbour was completed at the end of 1998 there is still other work to be done to complete the Cup Village. Each syndicate arranges the construction of its own facilities. This can range from America One, and (the Italian) Prada’s serious looking bases to the hut Dennis Conner intercepted to put on his patch of ground. Ms Foley says there are 16 syndicates involved in the challenge (two having pulled out) but there is still a fair degree of latitude over how much space each syndicate wants or needs for its boats and support crew.

Main attraction
Around the village, at time of publication, there was also no shortage of construction going on around the Viaduct Basin: Prince’s Wharf, Quay’s, Latitude 37, Watermark and the Point are the names on construction boards around the harbour. Many of these developments are actually built on leased land owned by Viaduct Holdings Ltd. Viaduct Holdings is the successor holding company to Tramco Holdings which won the tender to purchase land from the Ports of Auckland in 1995. As at September last year Viaduct Holdings had an $88 million mortgage with WestpacTrust Bank over the titles of seven consecutive land parcels in the area.

Viaduct Harbour Holdings has 100 shares owned by BurtleA and BurtleB Nominees Ltd. Viaduct’s directors as at the company’s last return in September 1998 were: Mark Wyborn; Robert Campbell; Adrian Burr; Trevor Farmer; Warwick Russell and Mark Taylor. Alan Gibbs ceased being a director on 14 May 1997. One director of BurtleA Nominees is Nigel Burton, the solicitor whose firm Burton and Co acts for Viaduct Holdings. What with three Viaduct companies with Mark Wyborn as director and a very busy land transfer record on the Terranet database one could probably develop an expensive hobby out of trying to unravel the ownership of this company and its land - all for very little obvious purpose.

Suffice, perhaps to say, that Viaduct Harbour Holdings has made some astute purchases and is now leasing the land to a number of other developers for the construction of various apartment projects on the waterfront.

But the jigsaw of land ownership and water rights also has some intriguing holes and anomalies in it. Simunovich Fisheries trawlers will continue to operate from the same harbour as the America’s Cup contenders right through the challenge period. Colliers Jardine and Bayleys also have a "for sale" sign on the patch of land and water between the Team New Zealand syndicate base and the America True syndicate base. The Auckland City Council is developing a promenade and harbour on the water edge as well as upgrading facilities such as the 1911 vintage tepid baths. In short, the site has been a complex tangle of heritage ownership issues between Auckland City Council, Ports of Auckland, private developers and lease holders, primarily trawler operators.

The whole development of the Auckland waterfront, called Waterfront 2000, which extends from the Viaduct Basin in the west, through the contentious Britomart project in the centre and out to the Fergusson Container Terminal run by the Ports of Auckland, is coordinated by the City Council Harbour Edge Development Group. A call to projects manager Mark Kunath requesting an interview boomeranged back to Beca Carter’s Phil Ison who has been working with the small Council team on the overall planning of the Viaduct Basin.

"The America’s Cup Village is the catalyst for a lot of development which might have happened sooner or later but which the Cup defence has pushed forward. There are a lot of apartments being built which will bring more people into the city, and that in turn will make it a safer and more pleasant place to live," he says.

A New World franchise holder has already begun to construct an inner city supermarket nearby which will further enhance the livability of the village.

Not every part of the development will be complete when racing begins in October this year and the future success of the area will depend a little on whether or not Team New Zealand can successfully defend the Cup. Peter Hay has his views.

"The optimum result is if Team New Zealand can hold the Cup once more. That will keep the interest going in the area while it settles in. Then, for the good of the Cup, it would be best if there was another challenge series soon after and it went somewhere else. It wouldn’t do the Cup any good if it ended up looking like the New Zealanders had it completely locked up and were practically unbeatable. I mean, as soon as it lost the Cup the New York Yacht Club developed another. It hasn’t done anything with it yet but the obvious threat is there. If we’re too good we’ll just spoil the fun of challenging".