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The Government is working on plans to build tunnels for a new Auckland harbour crossing in secret, according to Mayor Wayne Brown.

“The idea that we would have a cross-harbour study that’s secret from the city that surrounds the harbour is nuts,” he said.

The mayor is accusing the NZ Transport Agency (NZTA) of keeping council in the dark over its feasibility study into options.

“We know nothing. We don’t even know where their office is. We don’t know who the consultants are. It’s bizarre.”

Transport Minister Chris Bishop rejected this, saying the Government has been “very open” about its plans and the process.

“For the last few months a barge has been operating in the harbour to look at the ground and seabed conditions, to help inform decisions ... this is hardly a secret. I’ve talked about it with the mayor, and I understand he has met with NZTA about it as well.”

Mayor Wayne Brown and Minister Chris Bishop attended a housing event last week. Photo / Sylvie Whinray

Brown said he gets on well with Bishop, but “he’s surrounded by poor advisers in Wellington, to be quite honest”.

The mayor was also dismissive of the Government’s options for a new crossing, promoted by Bishop, which focus on tunnels or a bridge close to the existing bridge.

Brown’s preferred plan is for a bridge from Meola Reef in Pt Chevalier to Kauri Pt near Birkenhead.

In a wide-ranging pre-election interview with the Herald, Brown also suggested that Deputy Mayor Desley Simpson was going to resign this year, and that when former police commissioner Mike Bush was conducting his inquiry into Auckland Council’s handling of the storms of early 2023, the two men did not even meet.

Simpson would not confirm or deny Brown’s claim that she was intending to resign.

In the interview, he denied that she had been considering a run for mayor in the current election. “You haven’t got the story quite right,” he said. He believed she was going to retire at the end of the current term of council, but had been talked into staying on by his own staff.

“I promised not to say much about that and I gave her a period of time to make her mind up. But she’s a good lady and complements me quite well.”

In response, Simpson told the Herald, “I took a long time making up my mind. I discussed at length with family, with mentors and with colleagues at council and in the end felt that the decision I made is one I’m really happy with.”

Simpson is Brown’s running mate on his Fix Auckland ticket.

Wayne Brown and Desley Simpson during a council meeting last week. Photro / Corey Fleming

Brown also said that during the inquiry into the 2023 storms, he had talked on the phone with Mike Bush, but they had not met.

He said he had learned “lots” from that event, including how unprepared he, the council and the emergency response setup all were.

Brown was widely criticised at the time for the aloofness of his response. The Herald asked him if he would do it differently next time.

“Yeah, I would,” he said. “But I would expect to be informed a bit earlier.”

During the interview Brown criticised the supporters of housing developments on the outskirts of the city, which he called “economic nonsense”.

Epsom MPs David Seymour and Paul Goldsmith have both promoted this “greenfields” growth as an alternative to the council’s new zoning proposals, which will increase housing density in their own electorate.

Brown said, “So we have to build houses in Pukekohe so people can keep their seats in Epsom? That makes no sense to me.”

He suggested the desire for votes was also motivating some councillors opposed to the new zoning. “One or two of my councillors have been a bit disingenuous with raising issues that are not really true in order to lift their chances of reappearing on the council.”

One aspect of the proposals is that they allow for better management of natural hazards, including coastal erosion and flooding.

Before the council agreed to adopt the new proposals for consultation last week, Brown said, “We didn’t really have the power to stop buildings being built in the wrong places ... And we had five councillors who voted against it. Can you believe that?”

The five councillors who voted against the new zoning were Christine Fletcher, Mike Lee, Ken Turner, Wayne Walker and John Watson. All others were in favour.

In the interview, the mayor said the sale of the council’s airport shares had already reaped a return that was “millions ahead” of the dividend the shares would have paid if they had been held onto this year.

This was confirmed at a council meeting on Thursday by Christopher Swasbrook, chair of the Auckland Futures Fund board, which controls the money from the shares sale.

In the interview, Brown said, “It was incredibly sensible and people who apparently had economic degrees opposed that,” he said.

Brown also revealed that one reason he doesn’t attend many meet-the-candidate events is that he finds them “unpleasant”.

“Sitting in a room with 10 or 12 people who’ve never even been a chairman of a committee, let alone run something bigger than a dairy, telling you that you’re useless and done nothing and you’re corrupt. I was just thinking it was really unpleasant ... I’d heard such a lot of drivel. And they talk about accountability.”

He walked out of a meeting in Whangaparaoa recently, while it was discussing accountability. He said he was going for a beer.

Wayne Brown with Fix Auckland candidate Victoria Short at the meeting in Whangaparaoa where he walked out. Photo / Sylvie Whinray

In the Herald interview, Brown was asked about the way homeowners in rural areas had discovered their rates were rising many times higher than rates in urban areas closer to the city centre.

“This time, the rural areas rose a bit and the city areas collapsed a bit. [But] the city areas had more than their share of the increases in the previous ones. It evens out in the long term.”

Asked if there should be some way to cap rates that rise much more than the average, he said, “I think there should be something done about that, but it’s not the rates-setting system. It’s the government valuation over which we have no control.”

He added, “Should they put a cap on that? That would have eased that pressure. I mean, the idea of a cap on rates is a simplistic idea to a complex problem. And people shouldn’t trust simplistic ideas to complex problems.”

Rodney Local Board member Ivan Wagstaff told the Herald yesterday, “We now have evidence ... that council was aware of the disproportionate increases coming to rural ratepayers as early as September 2024. They did not want to release this information and delayed it due to the levels of approval needed.”

Wagstaff coordinates a group that hopes to apply for a judicial review of the decision-making on this year’s rates.

Asked if he thought the council should be doing more to address climate change, Brown returned to the topics of transport and housing.

“I’m a great believer in freight moving off trucks and onto trains. There is no downside to that. The port weren’t doing much of that, but now they’re doing trains and trains every day.”

And, he added, “Keeping people living right next door to where they’re working is probably the best way, because we’re eliminating a whole lot of trips that don’t need to be made.”

Was he saying public transport with housing density nearby is a climate-change policy? “Absolutely. I totally believe in that.”

Did this mean he now had a bigger vision? Was he still grumpy, but not as grumpy? And what did he love about Auckland?

“There are many little things that I love. I’m intensely proud of little Brownie’s Pool,” he said, referring to the new open-air seawater pool near the Viaduct Events Centre.

“I’m going to build a lot more of those.”

Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues, with a focus on Auckland. He joined the Herald in 2018.