The HB Regional Recovery Agency (HBRRA) has issued its updated recovery plan for the region.
HBRRA Chair Blaire O’Keeffe writes in the foreword:
“Maintaining a unified approach to regional planning and infrastructure project delivery, along with simple direct lines to government is key to the region’s future, as the region plans for and invests billions of dollars, both recovery related and associated with essential infrastructure.”
Sounds sensible.
He then goes on:
“Further work to design a more permanent operating model for planning, coordinating, funding, procuring and delivering these priorities requires attention in the short term, so that momentum and benefits can flow over the coming decades.”
Some would call that model ‘amalgamation’, but already I digress.
Plan 2.0 continues the priority and programme themes of its predecessor plan, issued last September, with no real surprises.
But it gives new emphasis to the inter-connectedness of the many initiatives, with holistic land-use decision-making being noted as essential to ensuring the success of infrastructure and resilience efforts. The Plan gives this illustration:
“By way of example to explain this connection, land which is cloaked in vegetation has a better chance of retaining water and reducing adverse effects such as landslips, erosion, sediment loss and debris in waterways. These measures complement investment in flood protection and more resilient infrastructure designs. Similarly, avoiding locating housing or industry in flood-prone areas reduces risk to people and business and the severity of impacts from weather events.
“Without the consideration of these sorts of approaches where appropriate, another significant weather event could undermine the enormous recovery efforts which have been made to repair and rebuild local roads, bridges and other infrastructure.”
Plan 2.0 presents goals and actions in a number of near-term priority areas:
- Transportation – with roading costs of $1.1 billion, only $390 million funded, and councils simply unable to produce additional dollars required by current ‘local share’ funding requirements.
- Workforce Development – especially for infrastructure rebuild
- Housing Rebuild and Resilience
- Water Resilience – from flood management to water supply
- Hauora and Health Services – including hospital “redevelopment”
- Emergency Resilience – lifeline services – electricity, telecommunications
The following table summarises the Plan’s priorities.
Regional Priorities
| Silt and Debris | Over 1.5 million cubic metres of silt and debris remain on highly productive land from Cyclone Gabrielle. |
| Category 3 Property Buyouts | Action is needed to ensure the Government-led Kaupapa Māori buyout programme catches up to the broader buyout programme to avoid disparate and unfair outcomes. Further support maybe required for additional category 3 property buyouts if land categorisations change and current funding caps are reached. |
| Severe Housing Shortages | The region is at least 3000 houses short, with that expected to grow as work expands to restore damaged infrastructure. |
| Legislative Roadblocks | Legislation and/or new regulations could ease significant consenting and planning blockages slowing critical flood mitigation work. |
| Emergency Resilience | New measures are needed for more resilient power, telecommunications, and transport infrastructure for when disasters occur. |
| Water Service Delivery | A regional model based around the five Hawke’s Bay Councils is proposed with strong regional backing to replace the soon-to-be-repealed Three Waters water service entities. |
| Water Security | There is a pressing need to address the fast-growing demands for long-term climate resilient water supplies for one of New Zealand’s most important primary sector producing regions. |
| Transport | Significant recovery related investment is needed to build back better and address vulnerabilities on both state highways and local roads, particularly in the ‘farm/orchard gate to processing/arterial corridor’ element of the road network. |
| Health Services | Hawke’s Bay Regional Hospital needs priority work while broader health services need to be made fit-for-purpose to meet the region’s needs. |
| Workforce Development | Development of the local workforce is required to help meet the demand for civil construction workers for post-cyclone infrastructure repairs (estimated that up to 8000 additional construction workers could be required over the next eight years). |
The 28-page Plan contains considerable detail on both challenges and outcomes sought. When one looks at the Plan’s proposed actions, many of these seem to stray beyond ‘recovery’ and really speak to underlying challenges the region has had and would face irrespective of Cyclone Gabrielle. For example, it’s a big leap from silt removal and flood protection to solving the region’s broader housing needs, inadequate health services and medical staffing, and ‘3 Waters’.
Nevertheless, it’s useful to see in the Plan a comprehensive review of the region’s needs and the interplay amongst them. And it’s great to see in HBRRA an institutionalised voice for the region potentially emerging.