Road works big factor in Bordeaux closing its bakery stores
Tuesday, 8 October 2024
Long-running Wellington bakery Bordeaux is closing its doors, with its owner citing months of roadworks and a loss of customer car parking as major factors.
It is the latest in a run of hospitality and cafe closures in the capital and follows both Egmont St Diner and Deli and Pandoro shutting their doors last month.
The original Bordeaux Bakery opened in Thorndon Quay in 1992, while a smaller offshoot in Featherston St has traded for close to two decades. There is also an outlet on Lambton Square. All three, plus its wholesale operation, will close on Sunday.
Owner Tony Bates has been a vocal critic of the council’s upgrade of Thorndon Quay and was part of a collective of business owners who filed a judicial review in the High Court challenging the council’s decision-making process. The Court of Appeal later found the process to be flawed but didn’t order a halt to the work.
The project has since seen dozens of car parks removed to make way for bike and bus lanes, and a number of raised and signalled pedestrian crossing installed, or currently being moved.
Months of work on a crossing outside the bakery was the last straw, Bates said. Turnover had dropped between 60 and 70%.
“We were in a hole we weren’t going to get out of. We’ve gone from profitable in February to near bankruptcy … you can’t keep going like that.”
His 40 staff were told of the closure yesterday. Many had been with him for years ‒“I felt a bit like a surrogate parent to the younger ones”‒ and he was now supporting several who were in the country on a working visa to find other jobs.
“There were a lot of tears. It was a pretty sad day … It’s a real mess.”
Bates said the bakery had been a destination for people living in the surrounding suburbs, but since the road work began that patronage had completely fallen away.
“We never had a problem until it started last year.”
His issue was not so much with councillors, but with council staff who had “at best obfuscated and at worst lied” about the business case and the supposed “minimal impact” the project would have.
There were no plans to sell the business in the current “distressed” economic climate, and with the road works expected to take up to another year to complete, Bates said.
Councillor Diane Calvert said Bordeaux’s closure could be laid squarely at the feet of the Wellington City Council, NZTA and Greater Wellington Regional Council.
“[Thorndon Quay] was a project that was based on aspirational designs with no real accountability and the never-ending money pit that was Let’s Get Wellington Moving (LGWM).
Businesses were “never effectively engaged with” and construction was taking “way too long”, Calvert said.
The Woolstore’s Paul Robinson, who twice petitioned the council, unsuccessfully, to have an independent assessment of the economic impacts on businesses done, said Bordeaux had been one of the area’s signature businesses and was run by “very capable and diligent people.”
“Until the commencement of the poorly conceived and ineptly executed Thorndon Quay roading project, it was a popular and thriving business.
“Surely it is time for either the Ombudsman, or the Auditor General or the Minister for Local Government or all of them to investigate this project that is founded on ‘pie in the sky’ benefit assumptions and a grossly inflated budget.
“It is causing unnecessary distress.”
The Post understands specialised bicycle store iRide, also on Thorndon Quay, has recently closed its cafe and reduced its hours.
Meanwhile the council is currently investigating a proposal by Mayor Tory Whanau to pay selected business, affected by the construction, a “token” “micro-grant” of $1500.