Ultimately, community development is what shapes and drives us at Haigh Workman. Sporting infrastructure is still relatively sparse in the Mid North, despite the burgeoning population, and Te Puāwaitanga is a land development project with community at its core. So we relished the opportunity to help carve this multi-code sporting facility out of some raw paddocks in a Waipapa floodplain. 

Haigh Workman undertook all engineering on this complex site; a floodplain with soft alluvial soils. In many ways a site of this nature is ideally suited for sports fields. However, it did present significant infrastructure engineering challenges – not least ensuring that playing surfaces are elevated and that drainage is sufficient to keep the site dry and mitigate against the risk of flooding.

We conducted a pre-purchase geotech investigation of the site for our client, Far North District Council. This revealed deep soft soils with an extremely shallow water table. Significant ground improvement would be required for building on a site of this nature, requiring a lot of attention to detail.

The shallow water table meant that earthworks needed to be minimised in order not to ‘fight the ground’. We were reliant on following the existing levels to a significant degree – we didn’t want to do more than break the top-soil.

Added complexity came in the form of sports-field placement. The fact that this is a multi-code facility meant that the requirements of differing codes played a significant part in deciding on the size and orientation of the sporting surfaces – and the complex and extensive stormwater management facilities had to be worked around these.

All stormwater pipes had to be placed below the water table in extremely soft soil. Our client’s focus on social, or ‘broader outcomes’, procurement for this project dictated that there were many local, smaller contractors undertaking earthworks and associated site preparation. This focus on local procurement meant we were working with businesses that hadn’t yet been exposed to this level of site complexity, so significant amounts of liaison and oversight were required on our part.

Contractor engagement was an important part of our role on this project. With particular emphasis on ensuring a coordinated approach – minimising the potential for either duplicated work or gaps in the work-stream.

Another requirement for sensitive account management and good people-management and community engagement skills lay in the fact that we and the project managers were working with a variety of (sometimes competing) interests. These took the form of different community groups and sporting codes – all with their own requirements of this Council-led community initiative. 

Roading and traffic engineering was an important part of this project. The entrance to Te Puāwaitanga is off a particularly busy, and previously extremely narrow, section of State Highway 10. This involved significant planning and liaison with Waka Kotahi/New Zealand Transport Agency. The design and development of car-parking for the facility was also part of our brief.

The community has some ambitious plans for this facility. Plans that extend far beyond the core facilities that will be in place by the time the first phase of development is complete. We’re delighted to know that as Te Puāwaitanga grows it will do so on foundations, and using infrastructure, that we were lucky enough to have been involved in creating.

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Haigh Workman has the privilege of being the lead consultant in the development of Arvida’s Te Puna Waiora Retirement Village in Kerikeri. This Auckland-based, publicly-listed retirement living provider wanted to work with a local engineering firm to help realise its ambitions for a high-quality retirement village in the Mid North.  

Our involvement in this decade-long project started in 2017 at the pre-purchase stage, with a site ‘walk-over’ with our client to assess the general suitability of the site. Any developer can obtain significant value by bringing an engineering company in at the very earliest stages of the project to assess aspects such as the availability of suitable infrastructure and the phasing of any geotechnical engineering work that might be necessary.

As with any land development, the timing of this project was key. Kerikeri’s expanded wastewater treatment plant was under construction and, for the first time, a significant tranche of land that could be serviced by this enlarged facility was becoming available. We were able to use this local knowledge to help Arvida assess its options.

It’s always a pleasure to work with a client who is willing to be guided on aspects of its development and Arvida is one such. We were involved in the project master-planning and were able to coordinate early in the process with other experts who were key to the project’s success; architects, landscape architects, noise and acoustics experts, planners and community engagement facilitators, to name just a few.

We’ve had the pleasure of being involved with this project from design to the completion of various stages of construction, and then handover. It’s been a challenging yet incredibly satisfying piece of work. At Te Puna Waiora we’ve done everything that could possibly fit under the engineering banner: roading and traffic, civil works and infrastructure engineering, geotech, site design, structural design, environmental engineering relating to stormwater management and wastewater design, remediation of contaminated land (it was a HAIL site), and construction monitoring.

Social procurement has been an important feature of our project management. As lead consultant we’ve been responsible for delivering to Arvida a turn-key solution and this has involved local procurement; engaging, managing and – where necessary – upskilling a team of contractors based entirely in Northland. On any day there are as many as 100 contractors on site.

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