The saving of Sunset Point: Success or shambles?

Friday, 23 August 2019

Questions have been raised about how the Westland mayor saved Hokitika's Sunset Point from falling into the sea at little cost to the ratepayer after plastic was found amongst the rocks. Joanne Carroll reports. 

Sunset Point is a sandspit between the Tasman Sea and the Hokitika River and a place to enjoy a romantic meal of fish and chips while watching spectacular sunsets and waves crashing onto the black sand and driftwood of Hokitika Beach.  

Years ago it was rebranded to Sunset Point from 'The Tiphead', the name more commonly used by locals. 

It has traditionally been both a landfill and a fishing wharf.

What hasn't changed is the constant erosion.

Three years ago, it had to be closed due to safety concerns, the viewing platform was removed and the then council decided to abandon it and let nature take its course deeming it too expensive to protect from the unrelenting sea. 

**READ MORE:

* Investigation after polystyrene and plastic dumped in Hokitika

* Erosion continues to expose West Coast landfill

* Heart-wrenching sight for Operation Tidy Fox volunteers

* I bought a breadmaker after picking up 40 years of bread bags at Fox River

* Coastal erosion catches up with buried Kaiaua landfill

* Asbestos dump found on the West Coast**

Enter Bruce Smith. Before he came mayor, he was monitoring what was left of Sunset Point daily. He said Sunset Point offered the town protection from both the sea and the river. 

'We were 17m away from the river in October 2016. At that point I put a bit of pressure on a daily basis on council. Somebody had to do something. The road was gone and the sea had cut right in.  

'If they'd abandoned it and the old dump got washed out to sea it would have been a disaster. If it had cut through, the water would have gone into town in the first big flood. The town is lower and we would have been in the s***. I couldn't believe it. Every day you left it, it cost you more,' he said. 

When Smith became mayor, it was the first item he wanted councillors to work on in November 2016.

'I took the councillors down here at our very first meeting and said 'we are not going to stand by and let this get washed away'. All the councillors agreed and we did it.'

The council spent $250,000 to stabilise the area around the replica of the boat Tambo which was built by the Hokitika Lions Club and budgeted $37,000 a year to maintain the erosion protection works. As the sea continued to rage, the cost soon became a problem. 

Smith said the project could not have got off the ground without contractors like miner Evan Birchfield who has donated tonnes and hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of rock to help protect the site. 

'If you put a job like this out to tender you'd have no change out of $4m, $5m … So I rung up Evan Birchfield and I said 'Will you and your son come down to Sunset Point with me and give me some advice?'.

'So he come down, we were going to chop the end of it and he said 'Don't do that Bruce. This is what you've got to do.' So I've stuck to his plan religiously ever since,' Smith said. 

Smith contacted every contractor in the area to dump their cleanfill at Sunset Point instead of sending it to the landfill. 

'When they were digging up the dairy company to put their new kiln in I rang up the contractor Henry Adams and said 'the hardfill is perfect for us can we have all that?' and he said 'yep' and he put in. And there's been 30 things like that.

'Him, Westroads, virtually every contractor has co-operated. If someone is digging a section out we have a look at it. If it's a clean section we say instead of bringing it to the dump bring it here. They will also bring their digger down and level it up,' he said. 

Birchfield and Adams declined to comment. 

NOT SO CLEAN?

The pressure came on when environmentalist Des Watson who is travelling around New Zealand picking up rubbish from beaches spotted polystyrene and plastic among the material at Sunset Point. 

When Watson complained, the Westland District Council suspended contractors from dumping there while the West Coast Regional Council investigated. 

Smith said it was a one-off mistake by a contractor. 

'They had a building that had concrete panels with polystyrene stuck to it they dumped the concrete down here with the polystyrene attached to it and of course some broke off and blew all over the place. When they found out, they cleaned it up but the focus came on. It was a nuisance and it didn't look good,' he said. 

Smith's plan is for contractors to continue filling in the area, and once it is all level to reinstate the viewing platform and picnic tables.

FESTIVAL HOPES

The council was also awarded $485,325 to build a car park, toilets and shelter at Sunset Point by the Government's Tourism Infrastructure Fund. He hoped the Hokitika Wildfood's Festival could be held on Sunset Point. 

'I come down here every day. I use it as my fitness – I walk from the council building down here and people talk to me. It's part of what I do. At night we can get 200 people with tripods and they're all tourists.

'More fish and chips are eaten down here than anywhere. I often come down and there's people sitting here with a bottle of wine waiting for the sunset with a meal. It's really good.'

SHOULD ENGINEERS BE INVOLVED?

However, a number of councillors are questioning Smith's process. 

Councillor Gray Eatwell said he had supported saving Sunset Point, but had some concerns about how the work was done. 

'The transparency hasn't been there. When you look at the sea wall that was built by the regional council further along the beach, the rock protection at Sunset Point doesn't offer the same level of protection. It's slumping. It's not holding up as it should. You get what you pay for. The question a lot of people are asking is has it been done properly and should a procurement policy have been followed?'

Councillor Helen Lash said she had concerns about the area. She had asked for it to be put on the August agenda but was denied. She wanted to know what the ongoing maintenance cost and risk was to council. 

Would council, and ultimately the ratepayers, be liable if something went wrong? 

She did not think it was best practice for the mayor to be asking his associates to contribute hardfill, without any engineer signing it off. 

'If an engineer wasn't involved how do we know it is structurally sound? How do we know that it has been compacted properly? The answer is we don't. I was absolutely gobsmacked when I went down and looked at it. It looks awful. I saw bits of rusty metal, broken crockery, old bricks,' she said. 

Smith said it was 'daft' for council to pay for rock while contractors paid to get rid of it.

His solution was a win-win, he said.  

'The problem when you get engineers involved [is] he's got to come up with a design, he's got to come up with a solution that is bullet proof. The bullet proof solution is always 10 times dearer than a normal one, what a practical person would do. It was the same in Franz Josef. The wall that was built is better than any other wall down there but a third of the cost.'

Smith came under fire from the Auditor-General for building a $1.3m rock wall in Franz Josef's Waiho River without consulting experts, council staff or councillors. 

'The Coast is full of practical people. We add nearly 100 per cent to the cost of a job when you get consultants on board and that's where our money is wasted. I just think it's quite daft.

'If we got engineers and consultants on board they'd tell us for $4m we can fix this. And the councillors would all sit around and say we can't afford this and do nothing.'

'If people don't like what I've done they won't vote for me in October.' 

The report said the community had spent $1.5m in protecting Sunset Point. 

Chief executive Simon Bastion said the work to install was fully consented and the majority of the hardfill was out of the Hokitika River.

He said the sea came within 20m of cutting off Sunset Point and the river cutting through the old dump site.