Council scraps controversial CityTown trials in Timaru's CBD, asks consultants to focus on master plan

Tuesday, 2 May 2023

The council has scrapped the remainder of its CityTown trials planned for Timaru’s CBD and says it has “enough information” after spending $2.1 million.

Councillor Stu Piddington asked the council to provide the amount spent and to clarify plans for the project during its Community Services Committee meeting on Tuesday, saying he wanted to know “so we don’t have the debacle of what we’ve had to date”.

The trial to reimagine the use of Stafford, George and Station Sts unexpectedly went on hold in March after it was labelled a “total failure” by mayor Nigel Bowen.

At the time, Timaru District Council group manager infrastructure Andrew Dixon said Isthmus, the company appointed to lead the redevelopment work, had raised concerns about the “response that they got” with the trial, and were “a little bit cautious moving forward on future trials” involving layout changes to roads.

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On Tuesday, he expanded on that and confirmed the trials had been suspended by the consultants hired to carry out the work.

“It was really driven by our consultants who put a stop work notice on it. That was because there was getting a very much of a blurring of responsibilities of who was doing what.’’

But confusion was not the only reason the trials were put on hold.

“They had significant health and safety concerns, particularly around that last trial that we did.”

Dixon said the council had been working through those issues with the consultants, and had now refocussed and reset the entire project.

“We are planning no further trials at this stage. We believe we have enough information, and we’re also going to be utilising … similar trials that were done in other centres.

“It seems crazy to reinvent the wheel, so there’s some savings there.”

However, Dixon did not rule out further trials down the track.

“There could be further trials later on.”

It was expected other trials would include one to allow dogs in the CBD and others focussed on the north end of Stafford St.

CityTown would now be run as a “proper programme” and the council had appointed a consultant as a programme manager to oversee that, he said.

“We are using a consultant to get the programme developed … and he is liaising with our consultants and with other agencies that are stakeholders.”

Dixon explained he had not been able to obtain a break-down of the $2.1m spent to date, but said it had not all been spent on consultants, and included the cost of implementation of some of the trials.

He said there was a lot of work to be done in the CBD over the next 10 years, including upgrades of all the pipe work, water, sewage, power and telecommunications systems, and there would be significant private investment required too.

“We have focussed our consultants down to producing the master plan … they are working on that and that is their key focus to deliver that.”

Dixon gave Christmas as the deadline for the completion of the new master plan.

However, Piddington questioned the new focus and said he understood there had been a master plan in place since the beginning of the project.

“Surely that should have all been done before we set out on this project.”

Dixon said the master plan was always going to be produced, and the change now was focussing the consultants to concentrate exclusively on it.

In the meantime, Dixon said the council was still mindful there had been little progress in the CBD from a public perspective, and council was focussed on “quick wins” to improve that.

“We’ve got a number of quick wins, quite a list actually, that we will be presenting to the Steering Group … on the 18th May.”