Claims by a councillor that 300 additional carparks will be needed in the central city when Trustpower moves its head office to town are being disputed.

Tauranga City Councillor Rick Curach this week made the claim that a deal has been done over Trustpower's parking arrangements to cater for staff at its new Durham Street offices.

Trustpower is currently building a new head office on Durham Street.

But Trustpower community services manager Graeme Purches says Rick's claim there will be about 300 Trustpower staff looking for central city carparks every day, is wrong.

The $25 million three storey development will include only 75 carparking spaces on site and the company has more than 400 staff.

Rick's saying the flood of additional daily parking demand will force ratepayers to pay for a new $22-$25 million parking building much sooner than anticipated.

Until 18 months ago central city developments had to house their parking requirements on site. If they couldn't do it, then they had to pay city council a levy for missing parks.

The ‘growth pays for growth' policy would have meant Trustpower would be paying the city council $34,000-$38,000 for each park it required over and above the 75 – somewhere between $10 - $11 million.

That requirement was removed to encourage central city development, and Mayor Stuart Crosby says it's working. If growth in the city does bring forward the need for a new parking building that is a good thing, he says.

However, it doesn't mean ratepayers will have to pay for it as parking is a user-pay business and private investors have already been in contact with the council about future opportunities and developments.

Graeme says Trustpower's new three storey building will hold a maximum of 450 people. Trustpower has 350-360 staff at Te Maunga at the moment, but they are never all there at once.

'We are a 24 hour operation and we have meter readers for example, who take their vehicles home at the end of the day, and they can download the data off their hand-helds online so they don't come into the office every day either,” says Graeme.

'I mean our current building is in an area where there is no public transport. You have got no option, you have to cross one or two state highways, possibly a railway line or walk along a reasonably busy country road that has no foot paths and no shelter either to get to the office.

'So people either drive or partners, friends, family drop them off. There are a few brave souls on motorcycles and some cycle.”

He also says a lot of Trustpower staff don't work from the office every day.

'I regularly fly out, once a week I'm away for a couple of days, and I've got staff who do the same thing.”

The generation staff are constantly visiting the 26 hydro schemes and two windfarms the company has around the country.

'The environmental people are away all the time, and we have got managers that are at industry meetings all the time. You can't say we are going to have a building with provision for this many people and say they are all going to need carparks because it's simply not accurate.”

Originally the new building was going to have 75 carparks but this has been scaled back to 60 because more staff have indicated they will commute in the city using cycles and motorcycles.

'Having a new building gives us a really good opportunity to look at the way we work, and so we are working through that process with staff at the moment, to try and identify ways of working more efficiently to find out exactly what sort of transportation needs we are going to require once we move into the building,” says Graeme.

'And sure we had some discussions with council, but we haven't signed any contracts or anything else. We have had some discussions about working with them once we identify how many parks we are likely to need, once we come up with a solution.

'Some of the solutions we are looking at are things like having a hub somewhere where people can park a car and then they get transported from there to the office.

'If we do end up having to lease parking we will do it at a commercial rate, just as we do now for staff at the CBD. We don't want anything for nothing.”

Trustpower already has 65 staff working in the Tauranga CBD and the company leases 65 carparks for them.

'One way or another we are going to have to be paying for parking but it won't be 300 parks.”

Rick Curach raised concerns the new Trustpower building will bring forward the city's requirement to invest in another parking building.

The building and or investing in an additional storey on the Elizabeth Street carpark, is already an item for the soon to begin Ten Year Plan discussion process.