Ngā Ekenga Making Progress

The next year will be a big one for Naenae Pool and Fitness Centre – it’s the year we’ll see the majority of the construction work undertaken and completed. We’ve committed $26.7 million to this project in the year ahead, to bring the Naenae community and wider region’s pool users one huge step closer to a brand-new, world-class facility on their doorstep. The government’s COVID Response and Recovery Fund has also granted $10.8 million to Naenae Pool this year. We’re also spending another $1.2 million on the Naenae town centre project.

We’re progressing our ambitious plan to refresh and rejuvenate the heart of Wainuiomata with the Queen Street redevelopment, where we’ll spend $5.5 million this year.

In the next year, we’re planning to complete construction of the first two bays of Tupua Horo Nuku, Sunshine Bay and Windy Point, to the tune of around $16.8 million. The government’s COVID Response and Recovery Fund has granted $9 million to this project this year, and Waka Kotahi is contributing $4.59 million. While there’s a risk of weather events affecting timeframes, we’re engineering a lot of this project offsite to help mitigate this. We’ll also finalise the detailed design for the remaining bays.

RiverLink is continuing to make good progress towards making Lower Hutt more resilient, more connected, and more vibrant. In the year ahead, we’re expecting a Resource Management Act consent decision which will allow us to then engage with potential contractors and move our planning to the next stage, with $15 million budgeted in 2022-23.

To improve the resilience of our wastewater network and reduce the risk of wastewater ending up where it shouldn’t, we’re duplicating a section of pipe between Barber Grove and Seaview. The current pipe carries about 80% of the wastewater from Lower Hutt and Upper Hutt, serving around 150,000 residents.

More broadly, we’ve budgeted to spend $48.7 million across our three waters infrastructure (drinking water, stormwater, and wastewater) this year. This includes $2.5 million to upgrade our water supply reservoirs and $700,000 to upgrade the seismic strengthening of critical drinking water pipelines. We’re also spending $6 million upgrading the rest of the water networks – on top of regularly scheduled maintenance.

We’re spending $566,000 on switching the heating source from gas to a heat pump, to reduce carbon emissions and make progress on our plan to phase out gas across Council facilities. We’ve also committed $823,000 on upgrading the collection storage, to protect the precious taonga housed in the Dowse’s collection.

In the coming year we are going to work with Heritage NZ to progress Petone Wharf's refurbishment, and have set aside $7 million for this work. We’re also spending $206,000 to further develop the Petone 2040 Spatial Plan, and $1.5 million to begin refurbishing Petone Library.

We’ll also be implementing and delivering on the commitments we’ve made in our Carbon Reduction Plan, and the city-wide climate action pathway. We’re spending $381,000 on electric vehicle charging stations across Lower Hutt, and between July and September we’ll add 16 new stations at various locations. EECA are also part-funding this project with $278,000.