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
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 Saturday 27 February to…
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 access across the estuary from…
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, the Mahurangi Coastal Trail is not…
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…
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, towns…
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…
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 supported by community…
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…
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 message. To land a glowing…
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 costly and in imminent need of…
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 senior management had decided…
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 determined only…
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 website on…
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 society’s comprehensive…
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…
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 anniversary, legacy project, will…
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 be the same 100 who attend on…
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 and vision…
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 will be civil…
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…
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 Wenderholm, including the…
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…
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…
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…