Auckland City Facilities Partnership Scheme
What is the scheme about?
Auckland City Council receives a large number of approaches for very worthy potential partnerships. Due to limited funding to spend on community facilities, not all proposals can be supported, and it can be difficult to assess the merits of the wide variety of proposals.
The Facility Partnership Policy provides guidelines for council and organisations wishing to establish key partnerships. The main aspects of the policy are:
- an annual programme for receiving and processing proposals. This enables the relative merits of the diverse range of proposals to be comparatively assessed
- establishing eligibility and prioritisation criteria
- requirements in terms of documentation, fundraising and ongoing operations are set out.
Auckland City Council’s total funding for the scheme is $6 million over a three-year period.
How did the scheme come about – depoliticising the process
Leigh Redshaw, Manager,Partnerships and Funding at Auckland City Council, explains, “About 10 years ago, a common process for developing facilities was that an elected representative would come to the senior council officers and say - my constituents have brought me this great project idea, the community wants it’ etcetera…’ The process was quite politically driven.”
As a result, the wrong projects were sometimes being supported for development, resulting in duplication of facilities, poor ongoing community access, and less than ideal planning.
It was in this climate that council officers approached councillors with a scheme for assessing projects using independent criteria, ensuring that project merit was the key driver, rather than a mixture of merits and political convenience.
The policy was adopted in 1999.
Project goals
The Facilities Partnership Scheme aims to provide sport and recreation facilities (and well as non-sports related facilities) in Auckland City, in a way that optimises land use, minimizes costs, and ensures maximum community access. The key project goals are:
- community access to sport, recreation and other facilities
- developing existing council properties or other sport and recreation sites
- sharing and minimising costs to deliver maximum value to community
Auckland City, unlike many other councils, is land locked. There is no room for development of new rural land to allow for expansion. This scarcity of land, and the high cost of purchasing land in Auckland City, means the council must make the most of opportunities to partner community organisations and landowners.
Updated | 25 Jul 2008.
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