LETTERS: Green thieves?

27th January 2010

As someone who lived in Bassett Rd overlooking the park for 17 years, and a submitter to the first Management Plan for Newmarket Park in 1989, I am shocked and furious to discover that Auckland City now intends to destroy the park by stealth.
We formed the Newmarket Park Protection Society Inc in 1991 to stop the council from delivering the park land over to inappropriate development. Local residents raised thousands of dollars and successfully injucted the council in the High Court, (June 1995).
As a result, the council finally acknowledged the necessity to abide by the Management Plan and spent millions landscaping the park. But now a new bunch of politicians and bureaucrats, with no knowledge of its characteristics and history and no "corporate memory" of the true value of this reserve and its unique importance as an inner city pocket park, are bent on its destruction.
When landscaping of the steep escarpment above the Newmarket Stream commenced in the early 90s, it became obvious that removal of the vegetation and the network of tree roots which held the bank together, would seriously undermine the stability of the slope to the extent that another major, dangerous slip would be inevitable. Sensibily, it was decided to let "sleeping rubbish" lie and plant in a checkerboard pattern to mitigate the danger of erosion and mud avalanches.

Using big excavators to strip regenerating bush from steep, unstable slopes in Newmarket Park seems to surpass in stupidity all the previous efforts to waste ratepayers' money in this area since Auckland City took over from the previous Newmarket Borough Council. For example, the nearly completed teahouse by the lake which was left in the too-hard basket to become a haunt of drug addicts and was slowly vandalised.
Instead of disturbing the slopes the council should have been planting bigger trees with deeper root systems. Much money has been lost on brief spray-and-plant contracts which have failed to eradicate creepers, which have then come back and killed many of the new trees.
I can speak from long personal experience working as a volunteer in this and other parks, often single-handed (for which the Hobson Community Board gave me a medal in 2000). I have seen the geological report for Newmarket Park which shows it was a dump for soft fill, especially sawdust from Henderson and Pollard's mill, and then was used unwisely to tip much hard fill on top, including big chunks of concrete from the collapsed soccer terraces. There have been a series of slips, one quite near Ayr St and one just below the latest excavations!
I find it hard to believe that seepage from the tip would cause as much pollution as comes from drains further upstream. And I have never heard of children being injured on the slopes. These are too steep to play on.
If the council had condescended to ask the locals, especially those of us with botanical and conservation knowledge, we could have pointed to better uses for the money and effort, including removal of all the mothplant flowering so conspicuously at the foot of Brighton Rd; seeds from that can reach the offshore islands.
Peter S Russell
Parnell

Councillor Aaron Bhatnagar says he is happy with the consultation and passionate about removing the rubbish under the bush.
But if the whole park is a landfill won't that mean the removal of most of the park? Underneath rubbish on a landfill you'll just find more rubbish.
This is another example of ratepayer money being used for something that is more detrimental than beneficial.
Fletcher
Newmarket