3 units sell at Ray White auction
A productive forward-looking day at the council
Restaurant Brands lifts quarterly sales 14.7%
Stories online – building completions, hearing panel change
5.03pm:
3 units sell at Ray White auction
3 of the 5 apartments taken to auction at Ray White City Apartments today were sold under the hammer. Auction results:
Alpha, 17 Vogel Lane, unit 1104, sold for $419,000, sales agent Krister Samuel
Madison, 145 Symonds St, unit 207, sold for $287,000, Mitch Agnew & Damian Piggin
Portland Tower, 62 Queen St, unit 7B, no bid, Mitch Agnew & Damian Piggin
City Zone, 11 Liverpool St, unit 1308, sold for $330,000, Damian Piggin & Daniel Horrobin
Emily Apartments (ex-Four Seasons), 22 Emily Place, unit 4F, passed in at $370,000, Gillian Gibson
A productive forward-looking day at the council
Auckland Council had a productive day on 3 issues at its regional strategy & policy committee – licensing, the new empowered communities approach to providing community services and coastal erosion.
I’ll have more on these topics tomorrow, but the basics are outlined below.
When you look at the outline on these topics below, you’d most likely think it wasn’t at all productive, more like a sea of reports & plans to work out what action to take.
The productive element is that here was a council committee thinking forwards, focused (most of the time) on what needed to be done, becoming aware of how communities could be harmed when change was badly handled, looking for positive outcomes.
Licensing
The committee had 3 options before it on the structure for the district licensing committee, in a review agreed when the present structure was chosen in August 2013:
- Retain the existing structure
- Retain the existing structure but reduce the number of commissioners & members from October 2016, when the present committee contracts expire, and
- Reorganise into a locally based model aligned with local board boundaries, similar to the 9 clustered committees model proposed in 2013.
Although a number of committee members still voted for option 3 and others supported the sentiment, it was seen as impractical if some committees were inundated with applications and others had little to do.
2 local board representatives, Otara-Papatoetoe chair Fa’anana Eleso Collins and Mangere-Otahuhu member Nick Bakulich, spoke in favour of less intimidating formality and a need for localised panels & police involvement.
Cllr Alf Filipaina said when option 3 was rejected: “What we’re saying is, let the problems in the south continue. We’re now getting feedback from our local boards saying it is not working for us, our communities are hurting. I understand about the quasi-judicial format we have, but it’s about our communities.”
The majority agreed to retain the existing structure and the whole committee supported more work being done on how to capture improvements outlined in the review. The committee will get another report on that in August.
Empowering communities
The council’s budget committee approved the empowered communities approach on 7 May as part of the long-term plan, but local boards were concerned the new model would be introduced with no funding for boards in the first year to make it work.
The regional strategy & policy committee endorsed implementing the new model with a couple of additions. One was that progress against outcomes, structures & operation of the model would be reviewed & reported back to the committee in February & July 2016. The other was to support more funding to deliver locally driven initiatives being considered as part of the 2016-17 annual plan.
Erosion
Coastal erosion sprang to prominence last month when the council looked at what to do at Orewa Beach, where erosion has been a frequent problem and recently carved away long stretches of sand & bank.
Council chief engineer Sarah Sinclair gave the regional strategy & policy committee an update today on a multi-pronged approach – climatic impacts, managing the coastline, prioritised asset management, development controls, coastal compartment plans, a citizen science initiative, exemplar projects and budget planning.
She said a political workshop on work plans would be held in August, and the committee would get a report in October on workshop outcomes.
Restaurant Brands lifts quarterly sales 14.7%
Restaurant Brands NZ Ltd increased total sales by 14.7% ($11.4 million) to $89.1 million in the first quarter (the 12 weeks to 25 May).
KFC contributed $7.5 million. Carl’s Jr contributed $4.4 million, mostly from higher store numbers after the company acquired 7 Auckland-based Carl’s Jr stores.
Same-store sales were up 7.6%, led by 9.8% for KFC and 8.9% for Starbucks Coffee. Pizza Hut was slightly down at 0.5% and Carl’s Jr was down 5.2%.
Stories online – building completions, hearing panel change
Building work up 19% nationally for year, Auckland quieter in March quarter
Attribution: Company release, Statistics NZ, council.
