The division of Auckland [UPDATED: Maps]

[UPDATE: It was never going to be pretty.It was going to be a very lumpy custard.Carve off an enclave here and a strip there... a bit over the other side of the harbour... check the calculator again... little bit more there... It takes three Dr Frankensteins at work on this leviathan to make it look this bad. And all because they didn't want to go to the top end of 30 boards.When they try to force the pieces of a delicate jigsaw puzzle that has evolved from the villages and boroughs and districts over 170 years - each with distinct communities - into a pre-determined template using arbitrary population targets we get an ugly picture.

As for streamlining down to two tiers of governance they seem - in their haste to keep the total number of boards close to 20 - to have created a new thing called a "subdivision"When I find out what a "subdivision" means I'll update again. It seems to be an acknowledgment that the local - so-called "local" - boards are just too big.
And you can say haere ra to the old lefties on the Western Bays board/ward: It will be dominated by Parnell (you know, where the PM lives), Ponsonby and Herne Bay rather than Grey Lynn and Pt Chev.I can hear Graeme Easte screaming - and I'm in Avondale!

As for the inevitable hyperventilating over gerrymandering it is not backed up by any evidence. To the contrary: Indeed the Orakei ward is the Remuera - Eastern Bays stronghold of the wealthy patricians and is gigantic - big enough to have been split to break up the Labour stronghold of Tamaki and Maungakiekie as was previously proposed, but this has been reversed giving them one each instead of probably two for the right. Working class Manurewa-Papakura gets one councillor for 65,750 people, and the middle class Te Irirangi ward on the other side of the motorway it's one per 64,050. Albert-Eden-Roskill has been very good for the right-wing C&R group and their ratio is 1: 77,450, while the more left Avondale-New Lynn (Whau) is slightly less - Waitakere slightly more. Real gerrymandering by the National-Act Tories in these cases would mean using the higher turn-outs in the wealthy areas to their advantage by making them the rump areas and adding in poorer areas to split their force; but that has not happened in this case. I'm afraid gerrymandering can't explain the decisions. Click to enlarge.

As for the numbers on these boundaries it looks precariously divided between left and right if we were to go on income lines and previous voting and what they might indicate for the first election. Here's my picks:

RIGHT:
1 Rodney
2 Albany
2 North Shore
1 Waitakere (split)
1 Albert-Eden-Roskill (split)
1 Waitemata/Gulf
1 Orakei
2 Te Irirangi
1 Franklin
--
12

LEFT:
1 Waitakere (split)
1 Albert-Eden-Roskill (split)
1 Whau
1 Maungakiekie/Tamaki
2 Manukau
2 Manurewa-Papakura
--
8

But it is finely balanced the 2 councillor seats could easily go all one way and considerably alter the outcome - either way. Personality has always played more of a role than politics and tickets and caucusing, esp. outside the Auckland City Council establishment, so it really is anyone's guess at how it could pan out under this boundary scenario.--UPDATE ENDS]

Rodney Hide will be happy with whatever the Local Govt. Commission has come up with for the internal and frontier boundaries of Auckland because it is one irrevocable step closer to locking in his version of Der Über Stadt.

Hide initially gave a 20-30 figure for "local boards" and the Commission opted for 19! I reckon closer to the existing 30-odd community boards (see map montage below) would be the better option as it would maintain a continuity with genuine local areas rather than super-wards and super-boards whose populations are just too big.

As for the process, I note that one of the commissioners was Gwen Bull - the previous ARC chair from rural Franklin District who became wildly unpopular during her term in charge; and Grant Kirby was the man who was appointed in to run Rodney District after it became dysfunctional when Ross Meurant was elected onto the Council. So it seems commissioners from outside of the metropolitan urban area have determined what Auckland City will look like - chaired by a Wellingtonian to boot. It ought to be possible for Auckland's own elected representatives to sort this out rather than having these crucial issues forced on them from above.

My earlier calculations on the ratios to narrow down the possible options is reproduced below. Another possibility is that the "wards" could be interchanged for local boards and the "at-large" component swapped with wards to give further options about how the "governing body" of the new council could work, but that would almost certainly mean going over 25 members which starts to get undesirable for decision-making purposes (but I recommend rotating local councillors from the wider "Greater Council" which meets to set the core policies like the spatial plan, pass the budget etc. into the governing body Council, so that would keep the total number on the governing body to 25 or less).If every Auckland elected territorial representative could make a single preference on this scale it would be very helpful because the select committee submission process provided only vague demands rather than hard numbers I would like to have seen. A plenary session should be conducted to arrive at key decisions like board numbers and the composition of the council - that would be the mature, democratic thing to do; but Auckland's fiefdoms are notoriously warlike and even the flame of imminent death might not be incentive enough to start co-operating.

For reference and context this is the ward and/or community board boundaries as they are currently as provided by the councils themselves:

When the maps are downloaded this post will be updated.