Greater Wellington Regional Council PŪRONGO Ā TAU 2018/19 ANNUAL REPORT 2018/19 Greater Wellington Regional Council Pūrongo ā Tau 2018/19 Contents Chair’s foreword ...............................................................................................................................................................................................2 Chief Executive’s foreword .............................................................................................................................................................................4 Message from the Chair of Ara Tahi ..............................................................................................................................................................7 Our place in your world ..................................................................................................................................................................................8 Community outcomes ..................................................................................................................................................................................10 Putting a spotlight on some of the things we do ....................................................................................................................................11 Preparing For Climate Resilience .......................................................................................................................................................... 12 Wairarapa Moana Wetland ...................................................................................................................................................................... 14 Returning Our Nature To Life – A Predator Free Future ..................................................................................................................... 16 Overview of our performance .....................................................................................................................................................................19 Activities of the Greater Wellington Regional Council ............................................................................................................................25 Environment .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 27 Regional Parks and Forests .................................................................................................................................................................................................... 39 Water Supply .............................................................................................................................................................................................. 43 Flood Protection and Control Works..................................................................................................................................................... 48 Metlink Public Transport ......................................................................................................................................................................... 53 Regional Leadership ................................................................................................................................................................................. 65 Funding impact statements for Greater Wellington’s activities ............................................................................................................75 Council Controlled Organisations and Investments ..............................................................................................................................88 Financial Statements ...................................................................................................................................................................................100 Annual Report disclosure statement for year ended 30 June 2019 ...................................................................................................167 Statement of compliance and responsibility .................................................................................................................................................................171 Audit Report ..................................................................................................................................................................................................172 Other information ........................................................................................................................................................................................176 Regional Councillors ..............................................................................................................................................................................177 Council committee structure ................................................................................................................................................................178 Greater Wellington structure .................................................................................................................................................................179 Greater Wellington Regional Council Annual Report 2018/19 1 Kо̄rero whakataki a te Heamana Chair’s foreword In the context of the solid work produced by Greater Wellington I strongly believe the way we responded was a mark of over the year there’s little doubt that the most high-profile the willingness of Greater Wellington to work with the issue – and for many people the most important – was the community to “get it right”. There will be more to come launch of the region’s new bus network. as we progressively translate community expectations into services. We encountered scheduling, capacity and workforce- related issues that undermined service and generated It’s important, however, to re-state why we did what we did. fiercely negative, and largely justified, public feedback. The network was increasingly becoming unfit for service. But it should be noted that such an ambitious and difficult Journey travel times were blowing out due to traffic and plan was never going to proceed without issues. bus congestion, particularly along the Golden Mile. 2 Greater Wellington Regional Council Pūrongo ā Tau 2018/19 Low patronage and duplicated routes were costly and Much of its emphasis is on protecting and enhancing water diverted capacity away from routes with high demand. quality, and its approach is reinforced by a broad range of non-regulatory support from our Land Management Significant population growth, particularly in the northern service, which actively works with the rural community to suburbs, needed bus services to manage the flow of private help manage erosion, stock access and other factors that vehicles into Wellington city. undermine water quality. There is little doubt that the future Difficult though the experience was. I am confident that will see tougher standards applied both by our whaitua we are on course to do the right thing for Wellington and committees and by the Government to water quality, an frankly, with some modification, we would do it again. approach we as a regional council will support. At Greater Wellington we’ve also heard the rising chorus I am particularly pleased that we made great progress on of concern from the community on climate change and two other aspects of positive environmental management. we’ve redoubled our efforts to address the issues it poses. Biosecurity leads to biodiversity, and we made significant Our focus has been to work with regional partners to build strides on both, releasing the new Regional Pest Management shared understanding of the regional impact of climate Plan 2019-2039, a biosecurity framework which identifies change, an essential pre-cursor to far-reaching decisions animal and plant pests and sets out long term strategies for that will have to be made in the future. their prevention, eradication and management. We therefore worked closely with other councils to We also established the Collaborative Working Group, a complete the Wellington Region Natural Hazards partnership between Greater Wellington, mana whenua, the Management Strategy, which provides a policy framework Department of Conservation and a range of representative through which to address, among other things, climate community leaders. Its purpose is to look closely at how, as change hazards such as sea level rise and coastal erosion. a region, we can best support thriving biodiversity through To help our communities understand their impact we aligned agencies and community leadership. Both of also produced an online Sea Level Rise Mapping Tool and these initiatives lay the groundwork for sustainable a major report on coastal communities’ vulnerability to biodiversity gains. climate change. When we look back in a decade or so, I believe the past While slightly out of our reporting period, we also made year will be regarded as a watershed for New Zealand, the plain our determination to address climate change through point at which the nation finally started to face up to the both declaring a climate change emergency and signalling significant environmental challenges that lie ahead. Greater an agenda of initiatives to address it. Wellington should be proud of the