So the Government has announced that they prefer a new stadium on the waterfront rather than an upgrade of Eden Park. While a well-designed new stadium there may be great, I have a number of concerns about this proposal:

1) Firstly, I have my doubts about it being completed on time. The Rugby World Cup cannot really be delayed if the stadium is running late. There are only 5 years until it must be completely operational - more realistically only 4 - 4 1/2 by the time anything gets started. I presume that there is a significantly penalty clause in the the World Cup contract if we fail to deliver 60,000 seats in the stadium for the final.

2) I strongly suspect that the estimated cost of $500 million is significantly under estimated. Given the record of building many new buildings (and numerous other government projects), I have no confidence that they will be on budget. The Wellington stadium cost nearly doubled during development - Auckland's new stadium would cost around $1 billion if this happened here.

3) Funding the stadium predominantly via hotel and airport taxes seems completely wrong. Why should the tourist industry be hit with the majority of the cost for the new stadium? They are the least likely to use the stadium (and if they are, it could be recovered via ticket fees), and it is wrong that they be hit with it. Have the governments figures taken account of possible reduced tourism because of these additional taxes? Probably not.

4) How much will the Port of Auckland and other downtown businesses lose as a result of the building project? Even if the completed stadium has no impact on the port operation, it will certainly affect them whilst it is being built.

5) The council, and particularly Dick Hubbard, seem to be more keen about this idea not because it may be better, but simply because it involves a much smaller direct contribution from ratepayers (and consequently won't reduce their chances of re-election even further).

6) Michael Cullen dismissed concerns of the risks involved with this project by saying that all options have risks attached, including the Eden Park upgrade. Well, of course all the options have risks attached - but that does not mean that all the risks are identical. The risk of designing and building a brand new stadium is much more serious than the risk of upgrading Eden Park, and needs to be evaluated as such. Frankly, his comments are just silly and show a lack of understanding of any risk management.

But at least the Government is intending to bring in legislation so that it wouldn't have to go through the resource consent process - if it had to do that, it wouldn't get started until well after the world cup. Of course, this begs the question that if ignoring the resource consent process is fine for government projects, why not for others?

Posted by Dave Bryant at 8:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)