Wellington City Council Defends Process That Led To Decision To Demolish City To Sea Bridge

Scoop

29-04-2025

Lawyers for Wellington City Council say councillors were given multiple options, and deny staff pushed them towards demolishing the City to Sea Bridge., Journalist
Lawyers for Wellington City Council say councillors were given multiple options when considering whether to demolish the City to Sea Bridge, and deny staff pushed them to that option.
The council on Tuesday was presenting its side of a judicial review into plans to demolish the bridge – which connects the city's waterfront to Civic Square – in the Wellington High Court.
Lawyer Bridie McKinnon said applicants the Wellington Civic Trust had cast council officers as the villain in their testimony, alleging the officers filtered out options that did not adhere to a predetermined preference to demolish the bridge.
She said the officers worked under intense pressure and public scrutiny.
McKinnon said officers costed multiple solutions to make the bridge earthquake-safe, and set up workshops with engineering firms that councillors were able to attend.
She said the council was within its rights to focus on solutions that achieved its goals of safety, affordability, maintaining the site's aesthetic and allowing other construction work in the city's Civic Square to go on uninterrupted.
'Nowhere in the Local Government Act is the council obliged to identify all reasonably practicable options. That is not the standard. The obligation is to seek to identify them. The extent of those inquiries is at the council's discretion,' McKinnon said.
'It is not an open ended inquiry which never ends. The process of local government decision making would grind to a halt.'
She said public consultation on the fate of the bridge acknowledged demolition was a preferred option at that point.
She said council officers put forward six separate options, including lesser strengthening options, 'with a host of reports' explaining why these options were preferred or otherwise.
'Council officers undertook a significant amount of work to investigate the available options and present relevant information to councillors for their decision.
'They held site visits, held workshops with engineers and experts – [including] workshops open to councillors – to hear directly from experts. They concepted designs that were considered reasonable by experts even if they weren't considered reasonably practicable.
'Most, if not all, of the options that the Trust says were not provided to the council were – in fact – provided to councillors as options and were considered by council staff.'
McKinnon countered the Trust's characterisation of public consultation as relating to demolition options only as a reasonable reflection of the council's goals for the precinct within the context of its funding limitations.
'The nature of consultation often contains predeterminations in some sense. To consult on strengthening would have been disingenuous when the council did not have anywhere near the funding required to do so based on the information council had at the time.'
On Monday, lawyers for the Trust suggested that reducing the Importance Level (IL) – a measure of earthquake risk – of the Capital E building could open up a greater variety of options for strengthening the bridge to a level that was more aligned with its current use, following the closure of Capital E after it was designated earthquake-prone following the Seddon earthquake in 2013.
But McKinnon told the High Court on Tuesday that even with the lower IL2 designation, the building was unlikely to achieve more than 34 percent of its strengthening requirements.
McKinnon cited consulting reports into the building works going on about Civic Square in buildings such as the Town Hall, the former Capital E site – beneath the bridge – and the nearby Council CAB building.
She said the Civic Square area was subject to multiple issues – relating to flooding, earthquake damage and sea level rise – and all structures and public spaces in the area would have to be designed and built with a 'high degree of resilience' to withstand future events.