Paul Robinson: Thorndon Quay Collective chairman on the judicial review over Wellington City Council replacing car parks with a cycleway

Wellington City Council has been found to be in the wrong in a battle involving a cycleway and parking space. 

A group of businesses on Thorndon Quay opposed findings of a judicial review over the move to slash car parks near shops. 

The court's ruled the council was not compliant with its legal obligations in deciding to cut back the number of carparks. 

Thorndon retailer Paul Robinson told Mike Hosking he's hoping for an independent review of the decision-making process. 

He says a petition calling for an economic assessment was declined. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Another business story from the capital, this time yesterday it

(00:02):
was Cranfield's of course, in this crap with the council.
Today it's the Court of Appeal. They found Wellington Council
followed the wrong processes when changing angled car parks to
parallel one. Thisman going on for a long time in
Thornton Key. The result fewer car parks.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Of course.

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Chairmen of the Thornton Key Collector Paul Robinson is well,
there's Paul.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Very good morning to you, good morning life.

Speaker 1 (00:19):
So a nice one in the court. But they don't
instruct anything. So in other words, the council don't have
to do anything. Do you think they will.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Or we're hopeful that they will agree to carry out
an independent review of their decision making processes.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
The problem was the problem was they had public consultation
and all that proves is that they don't care about
public consultation because they went ahead and did what they
wanted to do anyway, didn't.

Speaker 2 (00:42):
They Well they did, they did. And you know we
have sort of three areas of real concerned. I mean,
the firstly is the safety data they relied on seemed
to be heavily skewed. Secondly, they declined find our petition
back in twenty and twenty one to have an economic

(01:05):
assessment carried out of the impact of business. And thirdly,
we've had this issue come up with the one hundred
and ten year old pipes underneath the underneath this very
expensive infrastructure they're building, and it just seems to be
in complete out of unwillingness to look at it, whether
that's an issue or not. Are they incompetent, Well, they've

(01:28):
demonstrated in competence.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Should it ever have got to court, I mean, for
God's sake, it's just to councilors and cow pikes. Why
does it end up in court?

Speaker 2 (01:38):
That's a depressing thought, Mike. Back in twenty twelve, we
had this wonderful interaction with council where we agreed that
it would be sensible to introduce the seven to nine
clearly going into town and that reduced the incident rate
by fifty percent. And there's been no efforts since it's
willing to move and come along. Has just been this

(01:59):
refusal to consider, perhaps, say, for instance, introducing a four
to six clearway coming out of town in the night.
They could have resolved all these safety issues with a
few tens of thousands of dollars, not fifty eight million dollars.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
It's unbelievable, isn't it. Well, go well with it, Paul,
and I hope the meeting goes well, and I hope
they acquiesce and they apologize and actually sort the problem out.
Paul Robinson is with the Thornton Key Collective Chairman. For
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