Regional parks – from zero to heroic 28 in 50 years
But in that time the population tripled, and there’s no budget for future acquisitions
Regional parks review round-1 feedback deadline extended
Round one of Auckland Council’s 10-year regional parks management plan review began 1 September. It was to end next Monday afternoon, close of play, but has been extended to 26 October. The 12 October date continued to appear in the discussion paper linked, but has...
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Tidal-river power and grid electricity
Most public transport in Aotearoa is fossil-fuel powered. But that would not excuse the key component of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail, the ferry, being fossil-fuelled. Fortuitously, as described in Minimum Impact 100% River-Powered, a fossil-fuel-free…
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Mahurangi Action president’s report
The planned fivefold increase in population of its tidehead town is critical to the future of the Mahurangi watershed. If, within a couple of decades, a town of more than 20 000 has an attractive, swimmable river as the hero element of a broad linear…
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Region survives serial secessionism
Serial attempts to turn the clock back six decades have failed, and deservedly. For without regional governance, Aucklanders would be much the poorer, for example, 27 sublime regional parks poorer. It would also lack a cohesive…
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Coastal trail and the river-mouth ferry
The urge to walk the coastline is as old as humankind. Within three years, the 4500-kilometre England Coast Path will be opened, initiated in 2014 under a Conservative – Liberal Democrat government. Aotearoa is geographically twice…
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Criteria for crossing Pūhoi River revisited
The principal objective of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail is to provide primary access to Te Muri. Based on vehicle counts, Wenderholm Regional Park receives an estimated 225 362 visitors per year, and Mahurangi Regional Park 59 595. It is probable…
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Criteria for non-footbridge crossing
There were good and obvious reasons for considering a footbridge. But there were also a good many reasons why a footbridge across the Pūhoi Estuary, as part of the long-proposed Mahurangi Coastal Trail, was a less-than-optimal solution. Firstly it would have had…
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Mahurangi-initiated 50-year plan hit by mainstream media
Dr Ronald Locker had suggested it as a national park. It was 1973, when he had suggested creation of a national park to protect his beloved Mahurangi Harbour, in Seacoast in the Seventies, which he co-authored with Professor John Morton and David Thom cbe…
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Car-free Te Muri with coastal trail no mirage
The indications were entirely auspicious, even before the wrap-up. Then the commissioners, who had just finished hearing submissions on the future development of Te Muri, outlined the points they expected Auckland Council’s planning officers…
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Convince the commissioners and Te Muri car-free forever
Auckland Council and the community are now in accord. Scheduled to be published today, are the council’s recommendations to the commissioners who will effectively determine the future of Te Muri. When the draft management plan was…
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Garnering major help to connect this coast
You read it there first, in a full-page spread in Junction Magazine, profiling ‘uber-human’ Tessa Berger, the 21-year-old chair of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail Trust. Anyone reading the glossy Matakana-based magazine’s description of Tessa’s achievements…
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Future is in increasingly self-funding regional parks
Operational budget $14.5 million, acquisitions budget $0.0 million, result misery. With a new one, on average, added every other year, regional parks had been the most popular purpose Aucklanders’ rates were put to over the last 50 years. But since 2010…
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Submission on Te Muri management plan variation
The following is Mahurangi Action Incorporated’s submission, as lodged in PDF format on 18 March, but without the executive summary provided here. In the pursuit of transparency, this submission was published in instalments as a work…
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Mahurangi Action on draft variation in respect to Te Muri
The submission needs to begin by putting the planning process in context. The timing of the Auckland Regional Parks management plan variation in respect to Te Muri, coinciding as it does with the regional parks 50th anniversary, presents…
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forParks Te Muri walk-in open day single-issue issue
Because of the urgency and importance of the upcoming Te Muri open day, we are breaking with our usual practice and making this a one-issue issue. There is, however, much going on in the regional parks, particularly during Seaweek…
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Share Te Muri with walking Aucklanders or their cars
It’s been timed for low tide that day, at 12.22 pm. Because, despite the Auckland Regional Authority’s citizens advisory group 29 years ago embracing the concept of developing Te Muri for walking access only, there is still no all-tide access across the…
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Long-form formal submission supporting coastal trail
Auckland Council has provided an online form that short-changes the Mahurangi Coastal Trail. While it allows submitters to respond to the primary actions and developments contemplated in the draft variation to the Auckland Regional Park…
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Reasons to believe footbridge will receive fair shake
Prospects for the Mahurangi Coastal Trail aren’t as dismal as they appear. Or at least as they fail to appear, in the ‘primary actions and developments contemplated,’ in the draft variation to Auckland Regional Parks management plan published yesterday. While…
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Parks czar provides perfect Te Muri Christmas present
On 18 December 1965, Aucklanders awoke to a Christmas present for posterity. Nine months earlier the region had learned that, thanks to the establishment of an authority that was able to act in the combined interests of 32 separately constituted cities…
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Post-Paris regional parks 50th anniversary rethink
With the 50th anniversary of the opening of Wenderholm to be marked this Friday, supporters are calling for a bold new community–council plan for the regional parks network’s next 50 years. The original visionaries, the region’s first planner, Frederick…
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Disdaining community input council plans new group
Simultaneously, it’s one of the best and the most preposterous proposals of the draft plan: Establish a friends group for the park and wider network of Mahurangi regional parks. Preposterous because, having relegated the concept most widely…
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Until March to counter plan to relegate coastal trail
Anybody who’d read the summary of phase-1 submissions would be utterly flummoxed. Of the 140 who made submissions to the Auckland Regional Parks management plan, 101 explicitly supported the concept for a Mahurangi Coastal Trail as the…
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21-year-old president rocks coastal trail dream
Her Facebook lit up. It is clear from the rapturous response to the New Zealand Herald article featuring newly elected Mahurangi Action president Tessa Berger, that Facebook is an essential tool in spreading the Mahurangi Coastal Trail…
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Recurring regional parks rear-guard action or 50-year-plan
By now it should be abundantly clear to all friends of regional parks. The Auckland Regional Parks network, about to begin celebrating its 50th anniversary, is seen by senior council management, and many elected representatives, as overly…
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50th celebrations avert requiem for regional parks
It’s 35 years since Yes Minister first ran, yet public servants still shamelessly subvert the democratic process as effortlessly as breathing. In a particularly preposterous case of usurping the authority of elected representatives, Auckland Council…
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Celebrity fundraiser rescheduled then reimagined
This proposed event was rescheduled, then reimagined following the spectacularly successful ‘Buy this beach’ campaign that has seen Te Awaroa Beach become part of Abel Tasman Nation Park. Long story short, the timing of the event will be…
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Feedback supports coastal-trail primary Te Muri access
Notification of public consultation on the intention to undertake a variation to the Auckland Regional Parks Management Plan to include Te Muri was undertaken in mid-July 2015. Information about the consultation went live on the Shape Auckland…
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Mahurangi Action phase-1 Te Muri submission
Mahurangi Action Incorporated is well known to be the initiator of the Mahurangi Coastal Trail concept. This unapologetic focus on the proposed coastal trail and Judge Arnold Turner Footbridge across the Pūhoi River, however, is symptomatic of the…
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Views sought on long-term future of Te Muri
It is only the first phase, but it might also prove to be the most important. When, in its dying days in 2010, the Auckland Regional Council purchased the $15 million, 383-hectare Schischka farm, a large part of the motivation was to take pressure off…
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Invitation to join the Mahurangi Coastal Trail 100
There will only ever be one, Mahurangi Coastal Trail one hundred. In one hundred years’ time, the 100 visionaries who, on 1 November 2015, pledged to support the bid to make the Mahurangi Coastal Trail the Auckland Regional Parks 50th…
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Need for coastal trail celebrity fundraiser 1-pager
There will only ever be one, Mahurangi Coastal Trail one hundred. One hundred years from now, the 100 visionaries recorded as having made the Mahurangi Coastal Trail the Auckland Regional Parks 50th anniversary legacy project will…
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Mahurangi Coastal Trail celebrity fundraiser
The Auckland Regional Parks 50th anniversary, legacy project. That is what the Mahurangi Coastal Trail must become, if Aucklanders are to mark the first fifty years of their incomparable network of regional parks in a manner befitting its scale…
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Embolden parks chief by bussing in bridge supporters
The Mahurangi Coastal Trail has been paid a considerable compliment. Friends of Regional Parks, in addition to making the coastal trail its flagship project, is making the concept the subject of its annual general meeting, on 29 June. Amongst the speakers…
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How trail can help save a habitable planet
The Pulitzer Prize-winning Guardian is throwing everything at it. Well, nearly everything. While its ‘Keep it in the ground’ campaign is all over its environment section, there is no trace, on the newspaper’s main online masthead, of the millennial moral…
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3 separate vs one magnificent Mahurangi Regional Park
Waitākere Ranges Regional Park is more than 19 times the combined size of the three Mahurangi regional parks. Waitākere Ranges dwarfs the combined 900 hectares of the largely contiguous regional parks of Mahurangi, Te Muri and…
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Roll on the regional parks rolling 50th celebrations
Auckland Council is planning to push the regional parks 50th boat out. But rather than one grand event, or weekend, the celebrations will likely take the form of a season of events, rather like the way Warkworth’s 150th anniversary was celebrated. For…
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Wenderholm celebratory sunrise breakfast
There were very good reasons for celebrating in 2016. Thirty-first of March is the 50th anniversary of the purchase of Wenderholm Regional Park, meaning that the main celebratory event could justifiably been held on Tuesday. But while…
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Trail trustees sign on and board votes to support
This week sees concrete step number three, with step four imminent. Concrete step one towards the Mahurangi Coastal Trail was last November, when Christine Fletcher’s parks, recreation and sport committee voted for work to proceed on the…
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Second concrete step as coastal trail wins Friends
Friends of Regional Parks is strictly a high-level, umbrella group. It was formed to ensure that the Auckland Regional Parks network survived and flourished under the new unified governance arrangements for the region. So for Friends of Regional…
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Next step on coastal trail is trust and working group
Trust is the essential element in any successful collaboration. And it is never more so when that collaboration involves various community groups, elected council representatives, and council staff. Trust was clearly a key factor in Mahurangi Coastal Trail…
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Regional parks 50th celebrations perspective unapologetically regatta-centric
Submission to Auckland Council Appropriately, Friends of Regional Parks’ submission has a largely regional-parks-centric viewpoint. But when putting its oar in, Mahurangi Action’s view is unabashedly regatta-centric. It is hoped, however, that Auckland Council will...
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Auckland’s 175th and regional parks’ 50th anniversaries and Anniversary weekend as an annual major event
The decision as to which year to celebrate is slightly easier for the 50th anniversary. Auckland’s 175th anniversary is to be celebrated on Auckland Anniversary weekend 2015, eight months ahead of the day Captain William Hobson planted the Union Jack at Britomart...
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Coastal trail gains first concrete step
No better proof could possibly be had. Sat in the top-floor council chamber in the Auckland Town Hall, nine supporters of a $0.9 million coastal trail could have been excused for feeling unsure as to whether Auckland Council’s busy parks, recreation…
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Wrong for Mahurangi but right for Great Barrier
Submission deadline 28 February 2014 Ron was wrong about two important Mahurangi issues. At the time he wrote Jade River : A History of the Mahurangi, Dr Ronald Locker dismissed sedimentation as a serious threat to the health of the harbour, despite Dr Thomas...
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Mahurangi Coastal Trail high-tide Seaweek walk
Last year’s was a low-tide walk, and wade, with the odd wallow. Partly to demonstrate that the Pūhoi River can be readily be crossed at low tide, and partly to avoid the need to arrange for craft to ferry folk across, the Mahurangi Coastal Trail was…
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Looking back over 50 years of regional park history
In the early 1960s, Mr F W O Jones, Auckland’s regional planning officer, was concerned at the rapid growth of urban development along Auckland’s coastline, which was preventing all but a favoured few from having access to good beaches. He recommended that large...
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Low-tide walk to sample low-hanging fruit
Mahurangi can best ease the region’s growing pains by not housing its share of Aucklanders. According to the introductory video on the new unitary plan website, Aucklanders want a high quality, more compact city, in the face of the expected 30-year growth rate…
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First draft of report for coastal trail discussion at club
Te Muri is the centre of four regional park identities: Mahurangi East, Mahurangi West, Te Muri and Wenderholm. Mahurangi Regional Park was extended by a $15 million purchase of 407 hectares of adjacent farmland during the latter part of…
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$15 million Te Muri purchase lucky Te Araroa break
An additional argument has surfaced for the coastal trail. Between Pūhoi and Wenderholm, it was planned that Te Araroa should follow the south bank of the Pūhoi River. However, that plan unravelled when a property holder along the route refused to…
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Ten minutes and local board agrees to walk
A coastal trail, for the most part, should be built close to the water. But not only is it necessary to skirt the steep and cliff sections of the coast, the elevation gained rewards walkers with views that more than compensate for the slight exertion involved. The…
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After a century or more ferrymen to work Sunday
Once, they were an essential part of the roading infrastructure. Ferrymen were paid the princely retainer of £15, or more if they were very lucky, to be on hand to transport travellers across the region’s various rivers. Pūhoi River ferryman George Ryan received £20…
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Friends oppose local board bid to control regional parks
Friends of Regional Parks (FORParks) has joined ratepayer and resident associations and others across the region in opposing the move by some local boards to take control of ‘decision-making and oversight’ of regional parks in their wards. Local board control of...
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Road would ruin future for Mahurangi coastal trail
The grandest entrance to the harbour is from the sea, under sail. Coming a sublime second is to discover the Mahurangi on foot, from Waiwera. Currently, this requires closely judging the tide and some determined wading, to cross the Pūhoi. Once across the…
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A unique role for Mahurangi and public transport
The public transport needs of the Mahurangi, in most ways, are unremarkable. Warkworth and Mahurangi East have long needed both a local bus service as well as better connectivity to Auckland’s bus system. But what is unique about the…
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Te Muri acquisition key to coastal trail
It was to form part of a scenic coastal road. In 1966, when the regional council secured 63.8 hectares of coastal land at Te Muri for that purpose, such car‑centric thinking went unchallenged. Subsequently, the regional council’s ardour for the…
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Captain Jones’ legacy complete at Te Muri
Captain Jones had first tried to secure Ōrewa Beach. But £10 000 was too rich for the government of the day, and so most of the land between the highway sea was subdivided—with a single beach house now fetching the several million dollars that that figure equates to...
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Management plan review time for re-reading wedding bans
Weddings weren’t expected to be the subject of a Mahurangi Action Plan workshop. Nor did the Mahurangi Magazine expect to be posting wedding banns anytime soon. Nevertheless, the prospect of reversing the rule that effectively disallows the likes of weddings at Scotts...
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Review of management plan opportunity for re-reading wedding bans
Mahurangi Action Planning Workshop 24 August 5.30 for 6pm–8pm Venue Old Masonic Hall Weddings weren’t expected to be the subject of a workshop. Nor did the Mahurangi Magazine expect to be posting wedding banns anytime soon. Never-the-less, the prospect of reversing...
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Well worth the day out
Letter Just a note to say thanks for the very pleasant, and as you said, affirming, planting day at Sullivans Bay, Mahurangi. It was great to be there, and to catch up in such pleasant surroundings for such a good cause—well worth the day out. The Mahurangi Magazine...
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Planting day at Sullivans Bay: Think national, act local
Sunday’s weather was sublime, as was the planting at Sullivans Bay, on a number of levels. Regional councillor Christine Rose said to the writer on her arrival: I couldn’t resist your email! …notifying ‘Mahurangi and friends’ of the planting. Neighbouring [tooltip...
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Planting day at Sullivans Bay: Badly eroded hillside behind campground
Event date 18 May 2008 Come and help us plant trees! We are replanting the badly eroded hillside behind the Sullivans Bay campground. In exchange for your help, we will provide a barbecue lunch and hot drinks, hundreds of grateful trees and our thanks. Get to...
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Success after three decades bleatin’ into submission
The local’s vehicle-free concept blew the regional council’s plans for a road bridge across Te Muri out of the estuary. It was 1986 and test drilling in the bed of the estuary had rudely reminded locals that the splendid isolation Te Muri enjoyed was…
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Origins of Auckland’s regional parks
I was a member of the Auckland Regional Planning Authority from 1960 until 1962. Each territorial local authority in the region appointed a member of the planning authority and I had been appointed by the Mt Albert Borough Council. The function…
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