A Half Moon Bay grandmother contacted the Howick & Eastern Post to blow the whistle on a plan she said had been kept from the public.
Play equipment at nine parks across the Howick Local Board area is up for consideration for removal under a draft Auckland Council strategy.
“I think this is all hidden from the community. This plan to get rid of playgrounds is hidden, and that’s not right,” said the grandmother, who asked not to be named due to her connections to the Council.
Board members shown the list at a workshop on 1 October did not take it quietly.
In August, Auckland Council gave the 28-year-old playground at Tarnica Park in Northpark a new swing set, a new slide and a climbing module.
Within days of announcing the work, its own officers had Tarnica on the list of parks where the playground should come out.
The plan doesn’t give enough consideration to how far and how many roads a child would have to cross to reach alternatives, indicated Howick Local Board member Damian Light, who lives around the corner from Tarnica.
Chapel, Te Irirangi, Botany and Ti Rakau are among the most dangerous intersections in the country, he said.
“We do need to be a little bit careful about saying it’s okay because you can go across the road, but it’s actually quite dangerous,” he said.
Under the strategy the playgrounds would go piece by piece, as each slide and swing and climbing frame fails and the Board decides, each time, not to buy another.
A park’s renewal budget would be spent instead at a bigger park nearby, one the official papers say is already better used and better served by toilets, parking and paths.
The papers argue for fewer playgrounds and better ones, and already mark two of the nine, Tarnica and Tiraumea Drive Reserve in Pakuranga, as “ASAP”.
Staff are proposing the strategy be adopted at a business meeting in December.
Board members considered the draft and provided some feedback at a workshop, but formal decisions can only be made at a formal Board meeting.
The grandmother noticed the plan only because she was already watching.
She had been to the Council about the state of her own playground, at Prince Regent Drive, which is not on the list, and after that began following the Board’s workshops online.
Her worry is that once a plan becomes a strategy, it will be the guiding document for future decisions.
She wanted it reported “before it’s all a done deal”.
“There are so many two and three storey units being jammed onto what was one quarter acre section and one family. Because people are sort of in chicken coops now, they need that open space,” she said.
The consultation the Council did run asked about ages and kinds of play, but never about places, she said.
Beside Tiraumea Drive Reserve, in the column where a timeframe should be, staff have put a question to elected members and highlighted it in yellow.
The question reads: “Do you ask the community if they want to relocate the play space, or just move it as part of the ‘renewal’?”
At the workshop the argument ran hottest over Tarnica, where the money would go instead to Kilimanjaro Park and to a youth area beside the Logan Carr Reserve skate park.
The case in the papers is that children there already walk away from Tarnica, to three primary schools, passing other playgrounds on the way.
Take Tarnica out, Light said, and the Board would be choosing to leave a hole in its own network.
That part of Northpark has young families in it, he said, and the nearest alternative, Kilimanjaro Park, is more like a 20-minute walk.
Tarnica earns its place, Board member Adele White said, sitting close to Botany Town Centre and set back from the road.
“I can imagine a family picking up McDonald’s and going through there and having lunch and making the kids play,” she said.
Board member Mike Turinsky was less sure Tarnica should stay.
His children called it the Secret Park, he said, and it had caused problems in the past with loitering and partying.
Long term the Board could look at optimising it, he said.
Turinsky drew his own line at Wayne France Park in Botany, which the papers propose removing or consolidating at end of life.
The park is used quite a lot by the local community and its location is its biggest drawcard, he said.
“Upgrading it definitely is where I would land, rather than optimising,” he said.
He shared Light’s doubt that the nearby parks were accessible and safe to reach.
Light said he had opposed removing Wayne France in his feedback because the area is densely populated, though he did not think the playground was well used.
“You’ve got a bunch of rundown playgrounds. No one uses them because they’re run down,” he said.
White asked staff whether anybody drives around and looks at how busy the parks are.
The parks and places specialist presenting to the meeting told her the destination parks are “always really busy” and “lots of our local parks are not”, but she had no usage data.
Deputy chair Kai Zeng asked how residents’ expectations would be managed if Ballater Park in Howick were later rezoned for terrace housing and apartments, a possibility the papers raise.
Topland Park in Flat Bush is a small under-five play space, and the papers say the area is well served, with more under-five play possible at Salford Park instead.
Mission Heights Reserve nearby is heavily used and offers much the same thing, Turinsky said.
Light’s objection to Topland was about how it would look, “the optics of taking a playground out of Flat Bush”.
The Board already knows the suburb is short of play, he said.
Renewal money would stay in the network, the specialist said, spent on things the Council’s own play survey found missing.
“We need to be open and upfront with the community. We’re not taking away. We’re giving back,” she said.
The Board’s playgrounds are too alike and do not offer enough variety, Marcel Morgan, the Council’s area operations manager for Howick, told members.
“If people aren’t coming to your shop, you’re not selling the right product,” he said.
Playgrounds are also competing for one limited pot of capital with 260 kilometres of paths and tracks, with community buildings and with public toilets, he said.
“We want them all,” Morgan said, and then: “We simply can’t do it.”
What the Council says
The Howick & Eastern Post asked the Council why it was proposing fewer playgrounds.
In a written statement, Morgan said the strategy was about the mix of play on offer rather than the number of playgrounds.
“Not every park needs to provide the same recreation offering,” he said.
Morgan said he expected savings for ratepayers, but nobody has counted them.
“We don’t have specific figures at this stage,” he said.
Should the Board adopt the strategy, Morgan said in the statement, “it would become a guiding document for future open space investment decisions”.
Residents would be consulted park by park, it says, once specific changes are proposed.
The nine playgrounds under consideration for removal
Pakuranga: Glennandrew and Darren Parks, where one of the pair could lose its equipment, Reelick Park, and Tiraumea Drive Reserve, where the play space would move across the road.
Howick: Ballater Park, Grace Campbell Reserve and Morrin Cooper Park.
Botany: Tarnica Park and Wayne France Park.
Flat Bush: Topland Park.
