I attend hydrotherapy at William Street, Jesmond, three times a week. City of Newcastle (CN) has been building a new footpath, gleaming white in the sun, on this street. This is unusual because it is such a rare sight in our city.
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Living in the Newcastle CBD, which lacks many services (for example, hydrotherapy), I often drive to places such as Jesmond, Adamstown, Wickham, and Mayfield to find providers.
I cannot recall seeing any freshly laid (white) footpaths in these suburbs this financial year.
Those in front of new buildings, such as the Iris East End development, don't count because the developer, Iris Capital, is building and paying for this work.
My interest in the rapidly deteriorating state of Newcastle's existing footpaths was sparked last year when I tripped and almost fell on an uneven section of Hunter Street. Luckily, my walking stick saved me from a nasty injury.
CN isn't working on some of the city's most hazardous footpaths. Newcastle councillors tell me they are still waiting for a full briefing from council bureaucrats on the scope and cost of any planned footpath upgrades.
In August 2023, councillors were given a presentation by the traffic and transport manager on the "Walking and Mobility Plan".
This didn't contain any maps or specific footpath designs. The slides from the presentation said that: "the next steps will include the establishment of a working group and refinement of the policy".
Council officers advised: "The new strategy should be in place in the next few months."
When I checked back seven months later, in March 2024, council officers reported to a sitting councillor: "We hope to have the draft to Council in the coming months before heading to public consultation."
So, there was lots of planning and delay, but no new footpaths resulting from all this busy work, even in an election year. What is the holdup?
According to the CN Works Program summary, the 'Financial Year To Date' expenditure on CN footpaths by February 2024 was $555,000.
At $130 per square metre, that is a limited number of new footpaths.
So, why is CN spending so little on upgrading the dangerous and dated footpaths that blanket Newcastle?
Perhaps it is a lack of funds caused by cost overruns on vanity projects?
These include the Newcastle beach skate park, ocean baths, art gallery extensions, and the relocation and fit-out of the CN headquarters in rented premises on Stewart Avenue.
Most CN projects are on track for costing about double what was initially budgeted.
No wonder there is no money left to fix dangerous footpaths.
The worst example of CN waste has been the council's move from owned to rented premises, which was enormously expensive. The costs of the move blew out from the promised $7 million to over $17.6 million. That $10.6 million overspend would have bought a lot of new footpaths.
When I became the Hunter-based federal senator in 1991, John McNaughton invited me to lunch in his impressive NCC lord mayor's office in Newcastle city hall.
The building, which cost 12,000 pounds to complete in 1912, is wholly owned by the ratepayers.
This office now stands vacant, while five blocks away on Stewart Avenue, the lord mayor and her embattled CEO occupy spacious rented penthouse suites on the top level of the building.
Now and into the future, the Newcastle ratepayers are stuck with an ongoing exorbitant rental bill for the six levels of CN-rented offices in Stewart Avenue, starting at $2.335 million pa in 2019, indexed at 3 per cent over a contracted 15 years.
By 2035, that will have cost the ratepayers $47 million.
For that money, a lot of footpaths could have been constructed.
You can pass judgement on CN's wasteful and misdirected use of your ratepayer dollars in September.
