One more stage in bus stop saga

Local Government Minister Rodney Hide has "a lot of ammunition" if the council can’t resolve a basic problem in five years, says Shore councillor Ann Hartley.

Mrs Hartley says it looked bad when the council spent five years and $87,000 to redesign two Browns Bay bus stops and still couldn’t make a decision.

She described it as an "awful waste of public money".

At Wednesday night’s council meeting councillors overturned an infrastructure and environment committee decision to approve a new design for the Clyde Rd stops.

This followed pressure from the East Coast Bays Community Board and Browns Bay Business Association.

Councillors voted 11-3 for a working group to be set up to resolve the issue involving three councillors, a council officer and the board and business association representatives.

The new design proposed by council officers extended the single bus stops to accommodate more buses and provided wider footpaths.

But board chairman David Cooper said it would narrow the road and create a traffic hazard for motorists.

The board wanted the project put on hold and the money used put towards the longer term goal of a bus station in a different location.

Mr Cooper said he was "outraged" at councillors’ earlier decision to support the officers’ proposed design.

But councillor Chris Darby said there had been six reports to the board over 11 months and the project was on-track until the board raised concerns in March.

Mr Darby said it was time for the council to make a decision when the issue had dragged on for five years and the board was unable to make progress.

It wasn’t surprising there were big questions about delegations to community boards under Rodney Hide’s legislation, he said.

Deputy mayor Julia Parfitt, who proposed the bus stop design be revisited, said the council should try to resolve the concerns and it would only take one to two months.

Mrs Parfitt said many of the reports the board received from officers had been only brief updates.

The board hadn’t changed its November 2005 view that improvements to Clyde Rd bus stops should be an interim measure before a Browns Bay bus station site was considered, she said.