Old wounds from the time Tauranga was run by government commissioners have reopened during a discussion on future funding for the city’s civic precinct.

Tauranga City Council met on Tuesday to decide how the Te Manawataki o Te Papa civic precinct project would continue to be funded.

The $306 million precinct in the city centre Te Manawataki o Te Papa – the “heartbeat of Te Papa” – will take up a city block and include a new library, community hub, civic whare and museum, all facing a green space.

The project was started when the city was run by government commissioners.

Its future funding has been a continued issue for the council. After it was elected, it moved away from funding the project through the commissioners’ proposed Infrastructure Funding and Financing levy.

Along with borrowing, options discussed for continued funding included using money raised from potential asset sales, redirecting existing funding streams – such as parking revenue or airport surpluses – and looking for philanthropic funding.

The council discussion began with a suggestion the council could redirect existing funds.

Mayor Mahé Drysdale seemed to quickly tire of that direction and said it lacked transparency.

“This is how I see it – we’ve continually talked about keeping it simple, by saying ‘oh we are making money over here and we’re going to shift it over here and pay off debt over here’ but the ultimate result is someone ends up paying,” he said.

Several councillors also wondered if this would create perverse results, such as raising parking fees just to pay for the civic precinct, or binding up a future council which might want to make parking free.

In a split vote, the council decided that the most transparent way to proceed was to prioritise use of any profit from potential asset sales to offset new debt and rates-funded interest associated with Te Manawataki o Te Papa, and to seek more philanthropic support for the project.

Councillor Glen Crowther said the decision signalled to local philanthropists that they need to step up.

Councillor Glen Crowther urged local philanthropists to contribute, emphasising minimal ratepayer involvement. Photo / David Hall

“The wealthy people in this city were the people calling for this project more than anyone,” he said.

Crowther said ratepayers should contribute as little as possible to the project and the council should go to those wealthy people who said they would back it.

“Some of those people were saying, publicly, that the ratepayers would only have to foot half the bill, so if that’s the case they need to stump up with some money and put their money where their mouths were for year after year after year and support us to get money through their connections,” he said.

Past decision-making around Te Manawataki o Te Papa was one of several decisions made while the city was being governed by commissioners, which the Office of the Auditor-General was asked to look into.

The office declined to investigate it, a decision which still obviously upset some around the table.

Councillor Steve Morris said he felt the commissioners tried to bind future council decisions by the way they went about projects.

“I’ve learnt two things about transparency and accountability in New Zealand through observing the commission’s decisions at the end of their term, [one] is that you can give a narrative that is untethered from the truth to Audit New Zealand, and two, Audit New Zealand doesn’t care,” Morris said.

The council’s decision fed into the development of its draft 2026/27 Annual Plan, which will be consulted on in the new year.

RNZ