A Bedtime Story - A Cautionary Canterbury Tale.

A Heritage Alert reader has submitted the following Canterbury Tale or should I say a "Grimm" tale.

Canterbury University had a problem.  Their music school was too small and too noisy and run down. It lacked modern facilities for its performance students and it needed a new home.  There was plenty of space to build a new school and conservatorium  on their very own land at Ilam, but the Tertiary Education Grants Board could not provide enough funds for the new music school as well as all the other projects on the University’s wish list.

Meanwhile, the Arts Centre Trust Board also had a problem: how nice it would be to have an easy source of money to help pay for its programmes and maintain its heritage buildings! Thus the Chairman had a bright idea to offer its Hereford Street car-park site to the University in return for 50 years of rental income.

The University said “Yes please and thank you very much and we’d like other space in your buildings too, because the car-park site isn’t really big enough for us”.

The Arts Centre Trust Board said “No problem. We will get rid of some pesky little church mice tenants to make space available to such a prestigious and trustworthy tenant”. This enabled the Board to all breath a sigh of relief that  they would not have to work so hard to get money from other places for the Arts Centre.

Now the University had no money to build its new piece of music school.  So cunningly and between the mayoral office and the Vice Chancellors office a deal with the Christchurch City Council was hatched where they would rent the land and build the building for the University.  The City’s C.E.O. Captain Marryatt,  his staff, accountants and lawyers met the Mayor, Commander Parker. Behind closed doors they nutted out a scheme to be both developer and the landlord to the University, and then for a minimum rent the Arts Centre Trust Board would  play the part of landlord to the Christchurch City Council.

The University was pleased to know it would get its Conservatorium much sooner than if it stayed at Ilam and built on its own land. The Vice Chancellor, a previous business man and accountant, told everyone “This is great and to make sure no-one opposes us, we will drop our already approved architectural plans from the 1990s for Ilam, and go with the noted architect Sir Miles Warren’s design for the proposed building. Our P.R. experts will write a lovely story about the Arts Centre being our Spiritual Home, we can talk about ‘Town and gown’ and our music staff will be pleased to have fine new facilities. It will also sound high class if we rebrand the music department as a National Conservatorium. The students will just have to lump carting their instruments and themselves between Ilam and the CBD, finding places to park their cars and then take their instruments up to the first floor.  Everything will be hunky-dory!”

The Mayor’s Office supported the Vice Chancellor and helped by getting business men to wax lyrical in The Press about the idea of Town and Gown and how much a handful of about a hundred or so students would revitalize the city centre. The CPIT already have helped in the east with their 15,000 students spending their student loans. There may even have been mention of how getting the City Council’s foot in the door on such a valuable city centre site as the Arts Centre might in time reap great benefits not only as a car park but also further accommodation for City Hall in the very next block, (but this was not noised abroad!).

Current tenants of the Arts Centre, whose hard work and renovations of the old stone premises had given the city centre a much admired vitality over the years, got wind of what their Trust Board was up to – especially when their new rent demands came in complete with gagging clauses so they never disagreed with their land lord in public.  They then began to question the principle of having a bulky great university building, with access denied to most Christchurch citizens, in a key area of the precious little spare space left for future Arts Centre development. This seemed very unwise.

Ripples of alarm and discontent began to spread, John Simpson, Arts Centre Trust Board chairman ( and former University Councillor) decreed that anyone who was against the idea was biased and had a conflict of interest.  He went further and applied this to his dissenting Board members (now all appointed, no longer freely elected), excluding them from debates, votes and even from attending Board meetings. Out at Ilam, the University  Council held their meetings on the topic in committee and the minutes were never available to inquiring reporters.  In Tuam Street, after considerable public pressure to bring things out into the open, the Christchurch City Council agreed to have a special public consultation on the matter, not on the principles at stake or the wisdom of the project, only on the financial aspects.

Although the three entities involved are all funded by the public purse, not one has had the grace or wit to think past present matters of accountancy and can it be achieved without telling anyone. The University  used  what it calls, its “spiritual” right to occupy Arts Centre land, totally ignoring the “spiritual” rights of all Christchurch citizens to whom Norman Kirk and his government gifted the site to be used as an Arts Centre.  The Arts Centre Trust Board used financial expediency as an excuse to save it the trouble of  keeping the vision of the Arts Centre Founders intact.  The Mayor and many of his Councillors behaved like foxes in a hen-house to get control over a prime piece of real estate.

So, how does the story end?  How does the Arts Centre Trust Board limit the damage done to the Arts Centre by allowing the University and the Christchurch City Council to occupy any part of its valuable site? Unfortunately, when commercial interests and developers join hands with City Hall and City Hall joins hands with the academic Ivory Tower, the values that built our Arts Centre to enrich the lives of citizens and visitors alike, get thrown on the scrap heap. The needs of ordinary people to participate democratically can go to hell in a handcart.  If one of the three bodies in this unholy alliance does not stop holding hands, the only music to come out of this story will be the death knell at the funeral of our Arts Centre.

Anon. 12.09.09

 

 

Naming Games

It appears from the resource consent application, that the Arts Centre has undergone a name change.  It is no longer referred to as the Arts Centre or the Arts Centre of Christchurch but the Arts Centre Campus.  Who authorised this change?  Is it an Arts Centre Trust Board policy? Where was the public discussion of the issue?   I wonder how the non-university tenants of the site feel about this name and were they consulted?   Does the Trust Board really want the Arts Centre to be seen as an outpost of the University, as the name suggests?  Taken alongside the claim which has been made and not refuted,  that the University has been granted first option on areas which become vacant within the complex, it strongly suggests a desire on the part of the University to reclaim the site, aided and abetted by Arts Centre management.  

This impression is reinforced by the recent renaming of the Great Hall as the College Hall. This of course, was its original function and not surprisingly Mountfort's plans give it this rather prosaic name.  The architectural model Mountfort was calling upon was the Medieval Great Hall and the building has long been known by this name.  Why the sudden change as evidenced in a recent Arts Centre advertisement?  It makes no sense today.  We no longer have colleges of a single University of New Zealand.   It looks like an attempt to downgrade the status of the building, which, let us not forget,  also contains an important war memorial window.  College Hall does not have the same resonance as the Great Hall, which is entirely  consistent with the apparent aim of the Music School building to subvert the heirarchy of the site, as I have pointed out in an earlier discussion.

All in all these changes are not reassuring. Added to the name changes, we have the recent, non-notified subdivision of the site, which allows the University to make the spurious claim that there are no heritage buildings on the proposed music school site, because these will now be on separate titles.  It is easy to see the subdivision as a precursor to further redevelopment on other separate titles.  A picture is beginning to build up of a Board and management which is intent on completely changing the nature of the Arts Centre as originally conceived.  If this is necessary in order to protect the heritage buildings, then they have totally failed to bring the public on side.  The Board and management of the Centre act secretively. They dismiss the legitimate concerns of those who value the Arts Centre.  Tenants complain of poor and disrespectful treatment by managment and unwillingness on the part of the Board to listen to their concerns and now we learn that their rental agreements are to contain a gagging clause. We also hear that many existing tenants including music teachers, and many community groups which have formerly used rooms at the Arts Centre,  have been pushed out by excessive rent increases or hire charges. Even the University itself has mentioned the high costs of hiring the Great Hall as one reason for a decline of concerts at the Arts Centre.

Does this drive to force out the smaller tenants alongside the renaming campaign signal that the  Trust Board  is aiming in the longer term to have just one large institutional tenant, the University, with the exception, perhaps, of the Court Theatre, for they would surely not be so foolish as to  try to push that out?  Or does it plan to go even further, and transfer control to another entity?

Car Parking Questions.

At various times we have been told there will be 78 car parks associated with the music school site and that the Council would have 40 of these.  Now it seems there will only be 41 parks, directly under the building.  The area under the quadrangle contains no parking spaces according to the plans lodged with the Resource Consent Application. The exits from the parking area appear to be internal even though a ground plan shown on the University website indicated a basement exit close to the Court Theatre building.  Where, then, are the mysterious parks for the council to go? Have they been abandoned or will they be in the space under the quadrangle? If they are to go there, they would surely need to be constructed at the same time. Can we be given an assurance that if a car park is to go under the quadrangle any resource consent will be notified?

The car park also raises equity issues. Where will existing tenants with parking spaces in this area be  able to park? Will they receive rent adjustments to reflect lack of associated parking if that is the consequence of this building? And what of staff and students of the university? Given that most of them will be travelling between the Arts Centre and the campus, will the usual campus parking fee cover both locations? If not, this imposes an extra costs on the staff and students of the school. On the other hand, if it does, then other staff and students of the university are being asked to subsidise the construction  of a very expensive underground car park.