Heritage listing tunnels, stations a bridge too far for Ponter

Saturday, 6 April 2024

Greater Wellington chairperson Daran Ponter is daydreaming about bulldozers and TNT. He would like to see the Melling Station, which is full of asbestos, demolished.

“Quite frankly, I would pay to put the bulldozer through it or to press the plunger on a kilogram of TNT or what have you.”

Unfortunately for Ponter, the train station is marked for a heritage listing in the Hutt City Council’s draft district plan.

Ponter is probably not the only councillor daydreaming about demolishing heritage buildings, after a high-profile debate at the Wellington City Council saw the mothballing of the Town Hall restoration considered when the cost forecast leapt to $329m. The Melling Station is one of a number of pieces of infrastructure around the region – including hospitals, schools, tunnels and train stations – placed on the heritage list by a local council.

As part of the new State Highway interchange in the RiverLink project, the entire Melling Station will have to be moved to a new location. Because of the heritage listing, the asbestos-ridden building cannot be demolished and replaced.

NZTA Waka Kotahi will be responsible for relocating station, removing the asbestos, and then fitting it out – a process that Ponter describes as a lot of “faffing around” which would not achieve a modern, fit-for-purpose train station.

Taitā Station could be included as well, which Metlink assets manager Fiona Abbott said would constrain any future plans to expand or develop the site. “Scheduling these buildings will force a disproportionate weight towards heritage values at a time when we need to prioritise developing modern assets which encourage public transport use to protect the climate.”

Ponter said stations which were heritage listed were much more expensive to upgrade, pushing them to the bottom of the list for any upgrades funded by the regional council.

Alongside the train stations, there are four of Wellington’s road tunnels – including the Karori Tunnel, Northland Tunnel, Seatoun Tunnel and Hataitai Bus Tunnel – on the council list. The protected features are not just the entrances to the tunnels but the entire structure, pedestrian handrails, and features associated with historic tramlines.

Ponter said he was not unsympathetic to protection of the city’s heritage, but thought there should be “a little bit of common sense” when infrastructure which had a continuing purpose, like a tunnel or a train station, was added to the list.

He pointed to the facades of buildings along Lambton Quay which had been preserved to give the area the aesthetic appearance of heritage, but which were much easier to renovate and upgrade.

Councillor Rebecca Matthews said current functions needed to take precedence over heritage designations. “I think that heritage has been a no-go zone for too long … I do think there has been a Wellington preservationist kind of ethic that is at play here.”

Until now, the heritage list has been ever-increasing.

The approach had been that buildings and structures were listed after being nominated by the council’s own assessors or community groups with specific interests. But those structures were hardly ever delisted, other than in extraordinary situations like a fire or natural disaster – leaving cities with limited amounts of space, like Wellington, with increasing proportions of heritage listing.

“You can list but you can never delist,” Matthew said. The council had challenged that approach last month, when it voted to de-list 10 structures.

Dr Jamie Jacobs, Heritage New Zealand director for the central region, said the advice provided by the agency was “always pragmatic”.

“We come up with solutions that don’t burden owners, without having to retain things that maybe aren’t necessary for the heritage listing.”

There was a lot of misinterpretation of the agency’s role, he believed.

While they advised owners of heritage buildings and placed particularly significant items on the national heritage list, they were not an all-powerful body who had final say over enforcement of heritage requirements – that was all down to local councils and depended on what was included in the local heritage schedule.

“The best heritage buildings are used and loved heritage buildings. We work every day, every week, helping people adapt buildings to modern needs. So we don't see the city as a museum, we don't see buildings as untouchable and unchangeable, we see heritage as a flexible thing.”

Wellington city councillor Iona Pannett, also a heritage advocate, said it was a myth that a heritage listing made buildings significantly more expensive or too difficult.

“There’s been a whole lot of criticism about heritage from people who don’t know what’s going on,” she said.

That included her colleagues Ben McNulty and mayor Tory Whanau, she said, who had penned an “embarrassing” letter to Minister Chris Bishop advocating for a power to remove heritage listings and override the courts.

It contained errors including conflating the role of councils and Heritage New Zealand in terms of heritage protections. “When we advocate to ministers we should get things right,” she said.

In cases like the Wellington Town Hall, it was not only the heritage listing that had led the council to spend up large on the building’s restoration, but the importance of the building in the city.

The city’s vibrancy and events like CubaDupa and the Newtown Festival would not be the same without heritage architecture setting the scene, she said.

Councillor Ben McNulty, who authored the letter with Whanau and moved to remove 10 heritage buildings last month, took a different view about the inconvenience caused by heritage. “Heritage is, essentially, a tax.”

If the council ever wanted to expand the Karori Tunnel, it would struggle to do so because the structure was on the heritage list. “We’re giving up before we begin because we know how futile those efforts are going to be, how fruitless, how expensive.”

None of that was considered when a building or structure was added to the heritage list – it’s not even a consideration under the Resource Management Act.

Some of the structures listed and proposed for listing around the region include the fault line in Upper Hutt, part of Kenepuru Hospital, part of Hutt Hospital, Thorndon and Freyberg Pools, and several road tunnels.

Commissioners, like the Independent Hearings Panel who made recommendations on Wellington’s plan, determined whether a property had heritage value or not; the possible effect of a heritage listing was out of the picture.

McNulty said the considerations did not extend to common sense judgements about how heritage buildings were used or not used, which showed an overhaul of heritage listings was needed.

It was his amendments that saw 10 buildings removed from Wellington’s heritage list, in a decision that signalled a new approach to the ever-increasing heritage list.

Phil Barry, advocate for the Hutt’s Voluntary Heritage Group, is hoping other councils will follow Wellington’s lead. The group was formed in response to a swathe of heritage listings proposed by the Hutt City Council in 2022, including several private properties.

“Some of the individual properties really have little or no true heritage characteristics are just dime a dozen ordinary people's houses,” he said.

There was no consideration given to the costs imposed on property owners – which Barry said included higher insurance costs, having to use traditional materials, difficulties installing new technology like solar panels and basic renovations like taking down a chimney.

“You can’t really make any changes to the exterior without a consent, which costs money and is by no means guaranteed.”

To heritage advocates like Pannett, removing heritage seemed like a dangerous way to ignore the past. “We should be protecting more,” she said.