Mayor Wayne Brown accepts Auckland Council will have to pick up a share of the City Rail Link project budget blowout but says he will hold “tough” talks with the Government to push it to pay more.

That’s because - while the Government and Auckland Council have agreed to pay a 50-50 share of the bill - the Government has been making the bulk of decisions about CRL’s management, Brown said.

“We had no say in the Covid rules, we had less say than what I would like in the actual contract management set-up - the people that made the decision were from Wellington and inexperienced in my view,” Brown told RNZ this morning.

He also said raising rates to cover the project’s extra costs was an “end of the road choice”, not a preferred one.

It comes as the CRL project yesterday delayed the completion date and applied to Auckland Council and Central Government for an extra $1 billion in funding.

CRL blamed the Covid-19 lockdowns and lost time spent on site for the blowout, which takes the project’s cost to an estimated $5.493b.

It means Auckland Council is now facing an estimated $1 billion shortfall between finding the extra money for the CRL and in paying for flood damage from this year’s wild weather.

Transport Minister Michael Wood yesterday appeared to dash any hope Central Government would come riding to the rescue of Auckland Council, by picking up a larger share of CRL’s extra $1 billion cost.

CRL is expected to double the capacity of the existing rail network. Photo / CRL

He said the management and payment of the project had been split evenly.

“The arrangement in terms of CRL across governance and costs is that it is a 50-50 partnership between Auckland Council and the Crown,” he said.

He also called CRL with its new underground rail lines and stations as “essential to Auckland’s development.

“We need a functional mass rapid transit system that doubles the capacity of the existing rail network. It’s the equivalent of 16 lanes of traffic coming into the central city,” he said.

Brown said it was a good project but the Government had taken it over.

He said he might not be successful in getting the Government to pay more of the costs but he would talk to them.

“I’ll be going to the Government and saying, ‘Listen here mate we didn’t have 50 per cent of the decision making’,” he said.

He called CRL a typical project the government gets involved with by overestimating the benefits and underestimating the costs.

“I’ll be working hard to minimise how much Auckland ratepayers pay on this.”