Lest we forget Trafalgar

October 4, 2008
As the city gets ready to do battle over Trafalgar Park and whether it is finally time for an overhaul, Geoff Collett looks at the state of Nelson's principal outdoor events venue. -------------------- On a good day, and from far enough away, it looks a picture - the clipped green sward nestled into the bosom of central Nelson, unmistakably a major sports ground with its hoardings and pavilion and stands. In the unlikely event of a full house of spectators being in attendance, perhaps for a big rugby match or concert, the casual onlooker could even be convinced that the place lives up to its official billing as Nelson's principal outdoor events facility.
Up close, though, depending on your tolerance and sentiment levels, it could kindly be described as tired, unkindly as an embarrassment.
Bits are nice. The setting is pretty. The newish pavilion and newer seating on the western side are tidy and modern.
Much of the rest looks like the former pride of a ghost town, where the people who once cared for such things have long since moved on. Remnants of ancient paint peel away from huckery old outbuildings. Boards warp, tarmac cracks, ageing hoardings fade, lichen is thick on fences and pavement. Midweek, the breeze may not exactly blow tumbleweeds about, but there is no shortage of cracks and holes in the broken- down sheds and kiosks for it to whistle through.
Now look at it on paper - the various plans, reports, feasibility studies and investigations that litter the official record of Trafalgar Park - and the sense is one of perpetual flapping and fluffing about by past city councils; of procrastination, corner-cutting and half-measures.
The present council has, to use the necessary sporting cliche, sought to raise the bar. Like so many of its predecessors, it has accepted that the park has issues. Once again, the city is being told that really, ideally, it should brace itself for spending millions of dollars to get Trafalgar Park into a state suited to the modern world's demands for how big events should be run. Dreams of Trafalgar Park being chosen as a bit-player in the 2011 Rugby World Cup have added urgency to the case for the upgrade.
Inevitably, the council's plan for a $7 million overhaul has gone down badly with many in the community, especially those who feel the year-old administration is running amok with the credit card, trying to batter through as many big-ticket pet projects as quickly as it can.
The many arguments and deep passions - the city seems deeply divided - are to be aired next week when the council hosts public hearings into its plan. Whatever the upshot - whether the grand plan is approved, another round of half-measures rolled out, or nothing done at all - it is hard to avoid the sense that Trafalgar Park has become the stadium that time forgot.
Here's the Nelson Mail thundering via an editorial in January, 1996, when the council was working towards a $1.4 million new pavilion: "Trafalgar Park in its present condition is an embarrassment . . . its amenities are appalling. It falls far short of being able to cater adequately for big sporting occasions." Or in September, 1994: "In spite of its many good features, the park has become an embarrassment to the city because it goes nowhere near catering for the needs of visiting teams and big occasions."
There has been progress since, but it has been ad hoc.
In the mid-1990s, the park got its new pavilion (which turned out to leak badly), but promises that it was the first step towards bigger and better things proved hollow.
A couple of years later, $277,000 worth of new lights were put up to allow night rugby, but proved unsuitable for top-level games - both because they didn't meet broadcast standards and because the players could lose sight of the ball when it was booted out of the lights' range.
In the late 1990s, the shocking state of the playing field - which is badly compacted to the point that rain cannot drain through it, so it will quickly turn to a bog if it is not nursed through the winter with minimal use - was routinely thrashed around at council parks committee meetings. Some minor remedial work was tried, but made no difference. Now, the council is looking at replacing the whole playing field, putting in a costly, high-maintenance "sand-slit" base to sort the drainage out once and for all - the same solution talked of in 1997.
In 2005, the council of then- mayor Paul Matheson agreed to spend $2.6 million to attend to a list of requirements of rugby administrators to turn it into a first-class rugby facility. That was half the sum consultants who had studied the park advised was needed. There were to be more seats, new lights, new scoreboard, new coaches' boxes, new media facilities.
When its funding partners, the Tasman Rugby Union and Tasman District Council, bailed out, the city decided to spend its $1.56 million alone, enough to pay for just the new seats.
So the scorekeeper continues to do his job manually. The lights only get a workout for minor fixtures. The media "facilities" remain a couple of rickety wooden boxes perched precariously on the roof of the eastern stand - itself a striking artefact - and accessed by a steep steel stairway. They are in a heck of a state - holes in the walls and ceiling, dirty and grimy, rubbish left behind by unofficial visitors who apparently climb up and break in for late-night gatherings.
An ancient wind-up telephone still attached to a wall adds to the prehistoric air.
The park reminds Neville Male, the chief executive of the Tasman Regional Sports Trust, of the sort of fading sportsground that might be encountered while exploring the backstreets of a small country town.
Male helped to give the place a short-term facelift to bring it up to scratch for four Super 12 rugby matches around the start of this decade, but he sees that it is beyond the point of temporary fixes or the good-enough-for- Nelson attitudes which have helped it get by. "Time has moved on and what's happening now is sports are getting so much more demanding . . . Whether we like it or not, the quality of the facilities that must be provided for sports events are so much beyond what Trafalgar Park can offer us today, " Male says.
Not that he's derisive about what's there now. He favours the "tired" description.
He praises the Nelmac staff who tend to the playing field.
Like many Nelsonians he harbours some attachment to the old wooden eastern stand and is unconvinced by the latest talk that it needs to go to make way for something better.
He also echoes a popular line about town, that the park's strongest qualities are its location close to the heart of the city, and the fact that when it comes to a secure outdoor venue for large-scale, pay-to-enter events, Trafalgar Park is pretty well all we've got.
Adding to the sense of a trophy facility that is badly tarnished, most of the park's traditional, long-term users are on the way out, but not necessarily because of any discontent.
Cricket and athletics are bound for Saxton Field - athletics in the new year, cricket gradually over the next few years, dependent on adequate facilities being built as part of the steadily-growing multisports venue the park out in Stoke has become.
Cyclists who have an ancient but still- serviceable sealed track on the perimeter of the main playing field are aggrieved at renewed talk that the track - and probably, thus, a sizeable portion of their sport - has no future there.
There is no other track in the region, and none planned, although the council has thrown it back on the cycling club to come up with plans for a new one elsewhere.
It is fair to say that rugby's role at the park is a source of some suspicion.
Cycling Nelson secretary-treasurer Averil West says the cycling track is one facility that really does make the park multi-purpose.
"Most people are saying to me they can't believe (the council) would take away the track without replacing it (somewhere else) first, " just to develop bigger facilities for another sport, she says.
"Some people can get quite selfish, and that's sad."
Tasman Rugby Union chief executive Peter Barr is clearly frustrated by the anti- rugby sentiment running beneath the debate over the park. He says that rugby supports multiple users, but in winter, the dreadful state of the field means it can barely be used by anyone in bad weather.
Former mayor Matheson suggests that rugby bosses, including the New Zealand union, have been part of the problem.
"The attitude of rugby in the past has put a lot of councils right off the idea of investing, " he says when questioned about past councils' failure to tackle a full-scale upgrade.
Rugby is not necessarily the biggest game in town among Nelson sports fans, which hasn't helped, he says. And the sport has cried poor when it comes to spending money there.
Barr is not impressed. The union's well- known financial problems mean it has no money to put in now, but it contributed $250,000 towards the lights and pavilion, Barr says.
It pays 16.5 percent of its match-day gate take to the council. The Super rugby matches it has hosted have generated a million dollars for the city. And so on.
Rugby will do what it can to help any fundraising if the council decides to push ahead with big spending, Barr says.
Its immediate needs are for new lights - to allow televised night games - and for the field drainage to be sorted. The former is a requirement if it is to play Air New Zealand Cup matches there (not a certainty, given the debate around the Nelson-Marlborough union); the latter is essential if there is to be any sort of regular winter use of the park in future.
While the Rugby World Cup organisers have steeper demands, Barr says that from the Tasman union's point of view, other improvements could follow in time - although the media boxes, he readily acknowledges, are a disgrace.
Other park users' needs are modest, and pretty well satisfied now.
The Nelson Cricket Association is happy: "It's a pleasure to be here in summer, " says its executive officer, Gordon Davidson, when it is busy with all manner of other activities. It meets all the requirements for a first-class cricket ground and is used extensively at all levels from November to March.
Yet Nelson Cricket also knows that shared cricket and rugby facilities are becoming incompatible, both because the wicket area is too hard for early-season rugby to be played on safely (which was why this year's Super 14 pre-season match went to Motueka), and because the ever- longer seasons played by both codes are increasingly overlapping.
"It's not our wish to get off here, but we're very realistic to work out that we're not compatible with the rugby."
Historic and sentimental ties to Trafalgar Park aside, Davidson says the cricket organisation is looking forward to having new, bigger and better facilities to call on at Saxton Field in years to come.
So are the track and field athletes who have been among Trafalgar Park's other major users for decades, says Greg Lautenslager, Athletics Nelson's head coach for track and field and crosscountry.
He likes the place, says the grass track around the perimeter of the field has been one of the best of its sort in the country for many years and has hosted some memorable racing.
"As long as that park is there . . . there will always be great memories, " he says.
But new opportunities beckon.
It is not all about sport, of course. Trafalgar Park occasionally - very occasionally - hosts big gatherings such as concerts. The Dalai Lama, Tina Turner and Dame Kiri Te Kanawa are among the handful of big names to appear there over the past decade or so.
This year's Opera in the Park was shifted there because the traditional Saxton Field site was unavailable, and organiser Annabel Norman was pleasantly surprised. It worked so well - principally because of its central location to city residents - that it is in contention for future concerts.
Another event organiser, Pete Rainey, who ran the Salmonella Dub-New Zealand Symphony Orchestra show there a few days before the opera, was similarly impressed, although, like Norman, he can point to various shortcomings that make organising major events tricky.
Such hitches can be unexpected. The turnstiles, for example, not only look like they were salvaged from Noah's Ark, but are the legacy of a more slender age.
Some larger visitors to the opera event had to be let in through other gates when they couldn't squeeze through the turnstile entrances.
Rainey, also a city councillor, is cautious about being drawn too deeply into the debate about the park, conscious that next week he will be hearing the public's arguments about whether any upgrade should go ahead.
But he is willing to stick his neck out on one point: that past councils have been part of the problem, with their failure to go far enough.
"I think that the (last) council were remiss in only doing a half-pie job on that new stand. They should have sorted out toileting and lighting and a lot of the issues we are now having to grapple with.
"Why didn't they do the job properly, is a question I would like to ask."