City parking fee rise helps fill Council budget hole

By Laura Kvigstad, Auckland Council reporter. Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.

Auckland Transport (AT) revealed plans to start the financial year “on the front foot” by raising parking fees in the city to match market levels, at the Transport and Infrastructure Committee on May 18. Mayor Wayne Brown said parking fees need to be raised to match the market price.

“I don’t know why we are subsidising people to park in the city centre,” Brown said. He said there was also an issue with parking fines that required central government intervention before it could be changed.

“That is not helping because the parking fines are less than the parking charge in some places,” Mayor Brown said.

Mayor Brown’s comments prompted AT’s Finance Executive general manager, Mark Laing, to confirm AT was aiming to increase parking fees to match market levels on July 1.

“We wanted to start the year on the front foot,” Laign said.

Cr Julie Fairey wanted to know what the increased revenue was going to be spent on.

Laign responded that AT currently has a $30 million hole in parking revenue.

“The increase is effectively plugging a hole in the budget. That is necessary to help us deliver on the $375 million hole in the council budget,” Laign said.

He said AT was still finalising its budget and would be working on it over the next four weeks.

“We are reliant on that increase to actually help us deliver on our budget.” Committee chair, Cr John Watson, said parking sometimes involved equity issues but AT appeared to understand that things were not always so black and white.

“There are other bigger issues involved in this case, not least of which would be conceivably pricing suburban commuters or visitors out of the city centre,” Cr Watson said.

Local candidate for Democracy NZ

Okura resident Bill Dyet has been chosen by Matt King’s Democracy NZ Party as its candidate for the Whangaparāoa electorate in this year’s general election. Dyet, who is an aircraft engineer and has an MBA from Massey University, says it is an honour to stand for the party. He serves as a project manager on the steering committee of NZ Doctors SOS – a group of doctors who can no longer practice medicine because of their refusal to promote the Covid-19 vaccine as safe and effective. He says he is also concerned about what he calls “the overreaction to climate change and the disastrous effects of climate policies on our farmers.” Dyet is the Treasurer at Graceway Baptist Church, in Redvale ,and has recently helped establish a local community garden there.