Christchurch’s Parakiore sport centre a weeping stain in the rebuild story

Tuesday, 7 November 2023

The Parakiore recreation and sports centre is massively over budget, behind time and subject to a huge cost escalations claim by the contractor.

Mike Yardley is a Christchurch-based writer on current affairs and travel.

OPINION: Has Parakiore become a byword for a fiasco? Christchurch’s problem-plagued and interminably delayed recreation and sports centre remains mired in uncertainty.

The Crown’s delivery agency, Rau Paenga (formerly Ōtākaro Ltd) is now signposting a mid-2025 opening for the long-awaited sports facility. But given the spectre of further court proceedings being launched by the build contractor, CPB, and their extraordinary cost escalations claim for an additional $439 million to complete Parakiore, any firm opening date is about as solid as the ground conditions that have bedevilled this project.

In stark contrast, Te Kaha multi-use arena is charging ahead in leaps and bounds. Construction is ahead of schedule and, despite Parakiore enjoying a four-year head start, Te Kaha may well cross the finish line first, in two years’ time.

As the Minister of Infrastructure readies to relinquish her ministerial warrants, Parakiore’s quagmire could well haunt Megan Woods.

Rau Paenga’s delivery of projects fell under her ministerial purview and the Wigram MP was heavily instrumental in reworking the construction contract of the sports facility.

Megan Woods made some big calls about the future of Parakiore during her time in Cabinet, but they did not overcome the problems which have blighted the project.

Upon becoming Christchurch Regeneration Minister in 2017, one of Woods’ first acts was to order a review of the project, claiming a $75m “budget blow-out”.

She tore up the existing deal with the contractor, Leighs Cockram Joint Venture, arguing that “continuing on the current course would put the project $75m over budget” and would push the overall price tag from $246m to $321m.

Fast forward to today and the official project cost now totals $365m, notwithstanding CPB’s claims for an additional $439m.

On Friday, a spirited exchange played out between Megan Woods and the Waimakariri MP, Matt Doocey, with local radio host John MacDonald.

Doocey is adamant that the Leighs Cockram contract “would have delivered closest to budget and time”, given their local experience of the ground conditions after working on the Justice Precinct.

He continues to maintain “the $75m request was a contingency they wanted to build in for risk”.

“The decision to axe the local contractor has led us to where we are today.”

Woods retorted that “80% of the sub-contractors working on Parakiore are local Christchurch companies”.

But did she miss a trick six years ago by not shifting the facility to another site? You will recall that she eagerly scoped whether it would be possible to combine Parakiore and Te Kaha onto the one site, in a bid to reduce project costs.

While work on Parakiore stumbles along, the Te Kaha stadium is taking shape much faster and Mike Yardley says it could overtake the sport and recreation centre in the race to an opening date.

All the advice she sought scotched the idea. But why didn’t Woods seek to relocate the Parakiore project to firmer ground?

Eliminating the need to sink more than 7300 concrete columns into the ground, which would span the distance between Hornby and Ashburton, would have saved many millions of dollars.

As The Press traversed earlier this year, the original location cited for the sports facility, when the anchor projects blueprint was formulated in 2012, was the former Red Bus site, on the corner of Moorhouse and Fitzgerald Avenues.

But Sport Canterbury’s chief executive Julyan Falloon said that his predecessor, Geoff Barry, successfully advocated that it needed to be closer to Hagley Park – or even inside the park.

I believe the former Red Bus site should have been revisited by the new rebuild minister in 2017.

On Friday, Woods claimed “it was too far down the track to change the site”, which doesn’t square with her extensive review into merging Parakiore and Te Kaha onto a shared site.

However, she conceded that Parakiore’s location “is not where I would have put it if I was starting at the beginning”.

Originally slated to open in 2016, the ongoing failure to deliver this project is a deep, weeping stain in Christchurch’s rebuild story.

Ultimately, one day, the city will be enriched with the nation’s largest indoor sports and aquatics facility. And the city will finally have a 10-lane, 50 metre Olympic-standard pool again.

The only saving grace to the delay is the inadvertent relief to your rates bill. Upon completion, the council will operate the facility and the estimated operating loss will be about $5m annually. That alone equates to a 1% rates rise.

Yes, I’m grasping at straws, but for now, that’s one silver lining – one cost your rates bill doesn’t have to meet just yet.