Wellington’s Golden Mile or golden traffic island with a brown mile?

Friday, 21 November 2025

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There is now every chance of the Golden Mile becoming the golden traffic island atop a brown mile.

The first proper council meeting of a new triennium on Thursday started with a theme that defined the last triennium: A cost blowout.

In this case it was the projected cost of the Golden Mile blowing out from $160 million to up to $220m. The $160m itself was after numerous previous blowouts with the project – a complete revamp from Courtenay Place to Lambton Quay with a focus on pedestrians – down to cost $78m in 2020.

The Courtenay Place section alone blew out in cost in October by up to $25m alone, councillors were told on Thursday.

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New mayor Andrew Little, keenly aware of cost blowouts on the council’s Town Hall and sewage treating “sludge plant” at Moa Point, had promised a pause and review of the project when he ran for office. Bringing that to a vote on Thursday was the first major call of his mayoralty.

That vote passed 12 votes to four, with only Greens wanting to push on regardless.

Council staff had gone away to check the new estimated costings – crucially before contracts for the work were signed – in preparation for the vote and came back with the news of the revised figure.

But they also warned that pipes – notably wastewater beneath the Golden Mile section of Courtenay Place – were technically past their end-of-life and would eventually need to be replaced. While they were down to be replaced as part of the Golden Mile, the replacements were not on any other work programme.

Wellingtonians, dealing with decades of pipe underinvestment, are already well-versed in what happens when wastewater pipes rupture.

The Golden Mile revamp was to have been previous mayor Tory Whanau’s legacy and she had pledged to get the Courtenay Place construction contract signed before leaving office. She failed but got the start of the project – a traffic island on Cambridge and Kent terraces – built.

The fate of the wider project now sits in the balance, pending the review of current costs and risks. But it comes with a quagmire: A failure to act soon, or making any significant changes to the project, puts the government funding of about 50% at risk.

Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop on Thursday pulled no punches when asked about the project.

“Frankly, I am sick to death of talking about the Golden Mile,” he said. “It is not a government project. It is a city council project. It is over to them what they do with it.”

Little told the council it was “financially constrained” and the risk of the project was growing. But the council had previously committed to responding to climate change and making the inner city more pedestrian friendly and easy to move around.

His deputy, Ben McNulty, was incredulous with Green opposition to the review saying it ignored the “reality in front of us”.

“Our first call, we want to go with another cost blowout?,” he asked.

“This sucks [but] we’re between a rock and a hard place.”

Green councillor Geordie Rogers urged the council to flag the review and push on with the project.

“All the time we are waiting for more information people are leaving the city,” he said.

Green councillor Rebecca Matthews said five years of delay had already added cost and complication and a review would just add more.

“Too many times we have just pressed pause when we should have pressed fast-forward,” she said.

The review would take three to six months, with an estimated cost between $200,00 to $400,000, and include economic analysis on the long-term and short-term impacts of the project.

A separate Thursday amendment put forward by councillor Tony Randle, to pause work on the Harbour Quays bus lane and Dixon St cycleway while the Golden Mile review was done, failed after just six councillors – Randle, Diane Calvert, Ray Chung, Andrea Compton, Karl Tiefenbacher and Nicola Young – voted for it.

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