Speedway move on hold after Auckland Council delays stadiums decision
Thursday, 16 May 2019
Speedway is likely to get an extended reprieve to stay at its Western Springs home until at least 2021 and Auckland Council won't make any major decisions on its stadiums until after October's elections, a senior councillor says.
Finance committee chairman Ross Clow said a planned vote on Tuesday to confirm speedway's move from Western Springs to a planned new venue at Colin Dale Park had been postponed and was now unlikely to happen before 2020.
While the council awaited final submissions from major sports codes on its long-term stadium plans, Clow also threw his weight behind maintaining Eden Park as the city's premier sporting venue, saying there was no 'urgent need' for a new downtown stadium.
He also said the city had 'one stadium too many', pointing to the Warriors' home at Mt Smart as the odd one out.
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Clow was responding to a draft finance committee agenda which showed a planned vote on speedway's future listed as confidential – outraging rebel councillors who said such a secret vote would be a 'gross abuse of democracy'.
Councillors John Watson and Wayne Walker said the council would be liable to legal challenge if such a vote was held in secret, Watson saying there had been a 'lot of manoeuvring and deceitful play behind the scenes which make it hard for any opposition to organise itself'.
Walker said he'd learned of a planned vote only from people due to make submissions at the hearing, calling it a 'shocking lack of transparency'. They were considering a complaint to council chief executive Stephen Town.
But Clow said the paperwork had only appeared that way on draft papers to restrict access internally to accompanying reports about the plans – and he committed to any big decisions being held in an open forum.
Clow said the speedway decision was delayed because the council had extended feedback on the venue development strategy by another fortnight and the analysis of that would take several more weeks.
A decision to give more money to Eden Park and extend speedway's tenure had removed urgency from the process, he said.
Instead, a less controversial vote would be held to give funding for some groundworks at Colin Dale Park to support six smaller motorsports codes already making their home there.
In March, speedway was given a one-year extension at Western Springs after early being told it would have to vacate its longstanding home at the end of the 2018-2019 season.
But Clow said speedway's future home was now 'an issue for another year, effectively'.
Asked if it meant extending its tenure to include the 2020-2021 season, he said it wasn't his call but 'could be the case'.
Clow said it was now up to the speedway community to present a 'united voice' on what it wanted, but in his view Western Springs was untenable long-term because of restrictions on noise, the number of meetings and safety concerns.
Asked about the stadium strategy, Clow said: 'We've got one stadium too many, that's always been the issue – do you keep pouring money into three of them, especially going forward when there could be a new [downtown] stadium in 15 to 20 years' time or there could be a wholesale redevelopment of Eden Park in 10-15 years time?'
Clow said he hoped it would be the council's final attempt to get a working stadium plan and he wanted to get a clear united message from the sports codes' feedback.
He said Eden Park needed to be retained, but made 'more rectangular'.
On Mt Smart, he said the RFA was asking if it was justifiable to spend $200-300m upgrading it.
He favoured it instead becoming a 'centre of excellence' for league and athletics, rather than hosting major events like the Warriors' NRL games.