Wellington City Council reveals $40 million plan to upgrade central city wastewater pipes

Wednesday, 3 February 2021

Wellington Mayor Andy Foster outlines plans to upgrade the city's ageing wastewater network. First published on February 3, 2021.

Two new pipes will be constructed in Wellington’s CBD as part of a $40 million plan to revamp the city’s ageing wastewater network over the next five years, according to the city’s mayor.

Wellington City Council and Wellington Water revealed the proposal on Wednesday, detailing plans to provide a back-up network in the case of burst pipes on the existing central city system.

The plan comes amid increasingly frequent pipe failures that have seen sewage flowing through the streets of the capital and raised frustrations about successive councils’ failures to address a decades-old, albeit difficult, problem.

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Wellington Water’s proposed revamp includes constructing new pipes under Taranaki St and Wakefield St, and renewing pipes under other central city streets.

The proposal is the result of about two years of work between Wellington Water and the council.

Wellington Mayor Andy Foster said the new pipes would allow wastewater to be diverted should existing pipes break, rather than relying on temporary storage or manually transporting it.

Wellington’s ongoing wastewater pipe problems will cost $2.7 billion to fix over the next 10 years, and ratepayers are set to help pay for it. (File photo)

“The aim here is to build redundancy into the system so you actually can connect it in different ways,” he said in an interview on Wednesday.

The plans involve constructing a new pump station and rising main under Taranaki St, and a new connection to that main under Wakefield St from Kent Terrace.

Work will also be done to renew rising mains under Victoria St, Wakefield St and Dixon St, and the Kent Terrace rising main, which runs from the Basin Reserve to Oriental Bay.

Wellington Water’s chief wastewater advisor, Steve Hutchison, said the new pipes would initially serve as back-ups, but would eventually be used as a regular part of the system as demand increased.

Wellington Mayor Andy Foster says he is preferring to look forward, not back, when it comes to fixing the city’s pipes. (File photo)

Design work on the first phase of the project – the pump station and rising main along Taranaki St – would begin from July, provided funding was allocated in the city council’s 2021-2031 Long-Term Plan. Hutchison said the project had been included in the council’s draft plan, which has not yet been made public.

The capital’s ageing wastewater pipes have reached breaking point over the past year, with Wellington Water recording more than 2000 pipe bursts – or more than 40 a week – in its latest annual report. Wellington's wastewater pipes have an average age of 51 years, the oldest of any city in New Zealand.

It’s estimated the council will need to spend $578m over the next 10 years to maintain existing water pipes, and between $2.2 billion and $4.5b over the next 30 years to construct new pipes.

Two former Wellington mayors, along with Foster, recently pointed the finger at council management for the current problems, claiming some money allocated for asset renewals had not been spent and councillors had been misled about the extent of the problems.

An internal investigation by a mayoral taskforce on water last year found Wellington City Council had suffered from an “out of sight, out of mind” mentality which led to an underfunded, breaking and poorly understood pipes network.

The council had been setting aside enough money to keep up with the required repairs but had consistently diverted as much as half of the money to other projects.

Foster, who has been on the council since 1992, said on Wednesday he was focusing on looking forward, not back.

“I’m not looking to point the blame at past mayors, or past chief executives, or past councils, or whatever,” he said. “The key thing is we’ve got an issue, the issue has come to the fore – very spectacularly last summer – and we’re moving at pace to fix it.”

Pipe condition assessments were under way and would be ongoing, Foster said.

Those assessments had been done in the past but at some point had fallen away, he said.

“I suspect that’s [because of] budget squeezes, but not budget squeezes that I think councils were ever aware were going on.”

He said money for asset renewals would be “ring-fenced”, and the council would be demanding regular updates from Wellington Water, a council-controlled organisation, about where money had been spent.