The Strong Towns Podcast
New Zealand’s infrastructure commission added up every sector’s project wish‑list—and found a bill voters could never realistically pay. In this conversation, Geoff Cooper and Chuck Marohn unpack the national plan that starts by centering maintenance and renewals, then shows how that shifts the debate over big new projects, growth on the fringe, and the pressure on public budgets.
Transcript (Lightly edited for readability)
Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marohn. Welcome back to the Strong Towns Podcast. This is the first podcast I have recorded from New Zealand, where I'm sitting in the city of Wellington, in the Todd Building. I have Geoff Cooper with me. What is your actual title here?
I'm the Chief Executive of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission.
The New Zealand Infrastructure Commission. For my audience, because this is going to be different than what most of them experience — what is the role that the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission has in this country? I've tried to explain to people that it's like our Department of Transportation, but more. I feel like that almost sells short what you guys are doing.
It's an independent advisor on infrastructure. We report to a minister, an elected member of parliament, but we have our own board, so in a governance sense we're independent. That was the origin of these kinds of institutions. Commissions have popped up starting, I think, in the UK, and then Australia, Canada, and so on. The impetus here was that independence was important for capital investment decisions — decisions to invest in things can get caught in political crossfires, and we need an institution that's independent of those to direct us in a way that's consistent with what we actually see on the ground.
So that doesn't happen here in New Zealand at all.
No, it happens all the time, which is why, I suppose, we're around.
You and I first met and started talking because the Commission created a national infrastructure report. When I was here last year, it was in draft form. You presented it to Parliament, and now it is in final form. Can we talk about that document? When I was first presented with the idea of coming here, I thought — well, first of all, what do I have to say that could be interesting in New Zealand? And second, I thought the National Infrastructure Commission was going to be some big bureaucracy that just does mega projects, and I was only going to make people mad.
I get here and I'm enthused. This is amazing, and the work that you've done is astounding. But let's start with: what is this document? What is the process? Why were you asked — why was your team here — to put this together?
The motivations for it? There are probably many, but one of them was that we were having a lot of gyrations on the project front about what we should do, and that was creating disorder in the sector. We were doing this project, we were doing that one — we were trying to decide between really big projects that were market-moving because so much resource was going into them. We were asked to put together a national infrastructure plan that could speak to all sectors and all regions.
The way we went about it was essentially what I would characterize as a look down a project stock-take from the bottom up — trying to meet the macro-economic top-down stuff with the project-level bottom-up stuff. Then we looked back at what New Zealand has accomplished when it comes to infrastructure and projected forward, looking at salient trends like demographic trends, income trends, fiscal pressures for both local and central government, resiliency issues, things like oil price shocks we're getting right now — and said something about what our needs are moving forward: roadways, transit, sewer, water, 17 sectors in all.
I think this has been a really important point, because anytime you're working in one sector, you feel like the world maneuvers around that sector. The plan brings together and gives visibility over 17 different infrastructures. It includes schools, defense, energy, water, telecommunications — yes.
What is the interaction between the work that you do and the stuff that would be named and discussed in this plan? If I were a mayor, a city council member, or a local government official, what's the relationship between this plan and what I would experience on the ground?
One of the things we look at very closely is what our populations can afford to spend on infrastructure. At the end of the day, it's people that fund infrastructure. It comes out of the household.
This is so novel. I'm from America — I don't understand.
So people pay taxes, and then you use that to fund infrastructure. Here's the thing — where we started, before all of this, was by taking all of the plans of the many sectors out there. You probably have these in America as well: national transport strategies and plans, electricity, water, all of these things. We added up all of the projected spend in these documents, and then converted that number into what would be needed from a tax take to fund those programs. The numbers were extraordinary. We would have had to increase our debt-to-GDP ratio by about 90%. We were talking a 20–30% increase in average income tax per person.
We looked at this and said, well, this is political suicide. It's not financially possible. Why are we not prioritizing and having these discussions at the outset? The plan didn't start from a project-level bottom up. It started from: what have we spent in the past that hasn't bankrupted the country, and how can we plan around those kinds of numbers?
If you look at the plan, we use an instrument we call forward guidance, presenting it as a proportion of GDP — how much you can expect to spend on each sector in the future. For example, in the past New Zealand spent about 1.3 percentage points of GDP on land transport. When you add all sectors up, you get to roughly five and a half to six percentage points of GDP. If you go way above that, you're going to introduce political contestability into the process, because people are going to say, wow, this is really going to cost a lot — does it all make sense? You'll get contestability on the downside. Spend too little and you'll get contestability on the upside. We present this as a range within which you can meaningfully have a political debate, which is five to 7%.
Here's the interesting thing — the plans we see before we do this work are way above that. It helps benchmark what we can reasonably do. It has actually led the Commission — inspired in part by your work, Chuck — to ask questions about project financials. One of the most interesting things we've found in our stock-take of New Zealand's infrastructure is that we are not a rapidly growing country right now.
Growth rates are one to 2% for some of our places — population growth per year. What that means is that our networks are pretty mature.
While we focus a lot on the new build, the big mega projects, when you're looking at the profit and loss, it is renewals, maintenance, and operations that are the meat and potatoes of infrastructure. We often say that of all the infrastructure you're going to need in 30 years, up to 99% of it is already here. So what are we doing to look after the stuff that's already here? It has been striking that for a great many of our sectors, the focus has been on that 1% — at the neglect of the 99%.
What the plan does is focus the mind on what the non-renewal budget should be for infrastructure. It bakes in the idea that we will maintain the assets, and the insight has been that once you adequately maintain your existing assets, that line item for new is a lot less than you thought.
Let me contrast this with what I see most states doing in the United States, just looking at transportation. They say, let's come up with a long-term plan for transportation — hear ye, hear ye, come out with your projects and get them on the list. We'll put together a massive list of projects and needs. We'll have a scoring system so we'll rank them, but basically it's come forth with all your needs, and we rack them all up and look at them, and then say, oh my gosh, we have $20 billion in needs in my state.
You intentionally did not do that?
No, because that would be a disaster.
You would end up with a bunch of projects that you couldn't fund. More than that, you risk the prospect of ending up with projects that haven't been well thought through — and that might be worse, because the posture might be that this thing's ready to go. What we see empirically here is that when we think a project's ready to go and it comes up for a funding decision, that's when the real business casing has to start. If you don't take the time to do the geotech on your project up front before the funding decision, you sure as hell have to do it at the other end. The mantra in the plan is: think slow, act fast. These kinds of processes risk cutting across good planning processes, and the result is project delays, cost overruns, and service delivery that doesn't meet expectations.
If you create a plan that starts with renewals — which in the US we would call maintenance or reconstruction, basically taking care of what we've already built — how does that focus the rest of the conversation? It's 99% vs. 1%, and that's probably not far off from a budget standpoint. Once you get all the renewals on the table, you've kind of pre-committed to a lot of stuff. How does this change the conversation about what you've already done, and how does it change the conversation about what you're being asked to do beyond that?
These are great questions. On the first point — about what you've already done — it raises questions about what you know about what you own. The answers can be quite sobering when you look across public sector agencies. Do you have confidence that they know where their assets are, what they're valued at, whether they're insured, how they're being managed, and how you're going to get through that renewal cycle?
What we found was that when you think about three classes of infrastructure in New Zealand — private or regulated utilities — you can think about private infrastructures like hotels, or regulated utilities like electricity distribution networks. These kinds of categories are motivated to look after their assets, because if they don't, they lose their revenue stream. These are assets that are allowed to continue because we're paying to use them as we use them. If the owner of those assets decides not to maintain them, eventually their revenue stream starts to go down. So what we see for those sectors is that they generally spend about what you would expect to see on maintenance.
When you go to local government in New Zealand — which might be comparable to your states or cities — they have a process where they have to declare where they're spending against depreciation, and central government will audit that. That gets you about 75 to 85 cents on the dollar of expected spend. But for central government projects, we don't even have consistent reporting requirements on this. We found that of the eight capital-intensive agencies, half of them don't even have asset management plans in place or critical asset registers.
The starting point is not necessarily knowing how much we should be spending — it's: do we even have the architecture to know that? The results of that have been very troubling. Before you get into a world of whether we should be expanding these networks —
Let me make a statement. Everything I've found here in New Zealand has been thoughtful, well managed. What you just said — that half of those agencies don't even have asset registers — that might make it sound like you're running a fun house where nobody tracks anything. The reality is this place is pretty well run. I just want to attest that we have states that don't know how many lane miles they have, and we have major cities that have no idea how much infrastructure they have in the ground, let alone what their future maintenance budget needs to be. That's not an uncommon thing, when you go through a period of growth where you're just out building stuff and where you inherit old stuff.
It's still a reality. How does that reality inform the other side of the equation — where an agency will have all this stuff it can't really account for, but they come to you with this other urgent need, saying we're projecting this demand or we see this going on? How should policymakers think about that? Part of your job is interpreting these things for policymakers.
For any investor, the first question you want to know is: do we have confidence that these assets are going to be looked after once we do invest in them? On the second point, it's different for different assets. For networked infrastructure, what we're saying in the plan is that you should be able to fund the capital extensions from the network. That is a softer message than for commercial infrastructure. Think about an airline — if it's operating commercially, each route probably needs to stack up on its own merit, otherwise you don't do it.
That's not necessarily the case for networks like electricity or roads, where you might be prepared to take some losses on the edge of the network that you can cross-subsidize with the full network.
With your capital extensions, you're asking: can the network fund those capital extensions before we get into a world of asking government for money through consolidated revenues? This gets to the question of what is the financial case for building out edge networks. In a world with a lot of population growth, you're building out these networks quickly — oftentimes the financials look really good and you can just go fast. You can paper over a lot of cracks through growth when you're growing.
The problem is that when that growth starts to plateau and you realize you're not going to get any more revenue through more people coming in the door, the question becomes: do you have enough revenue off the existing network to see that network through a renewal cycle? Some networks in New Zealand are very good at this. I would point to the regulated utilities as being very sharp — always thinking about whether or not new assets are needed, knowing that if the people don't come, it's going to weigh down the profit and loss. I'm going to build a new power plant — I need a certain number of new rate users, otherwise that burden falls on all the other rate users disproportionately.
The rate payers and taxpayers in New Zealand are under immense pressure, as they are in many places in the West. Because of an aging demographic and flat productivity levels, those funds look like they're getting tighter, both for central government and for local government. The ability to paper over these cracks outside of the network also looks really difficult. There's a bit of a pincer movement going on: if the new asset you're building doesn't bring in more revenue than it costs to operate, and you can't charge that cost to the network because the network's under pressure, and you can't charge that cost to consolidated revenue because central government balance sheets are under pressure — what do you do? For some sectors, in some places, that's the key thing everyone is looking at. We've staggered through on the back of growth. Now we're at a point where we actually need really good asset management to make sure we have continuity of service.
It feels like what you've done historically is look to the central government for an investment so you can, if not experience growth, at least project it and hope it emerges. What I hear you saying, and what I read in the updated plan, is that's not good enough anymore.
No, I don't think it is, for a few reasons. There are some asset classes where the high projection and the low projection point in completely different directions. The example I'd give is schools and education generally. Because of the big demographic change happening, we're essentially seeing an increase in demand for infrastructure you use when you're older, and a reduction in demand for infrastructure you use when you're younger. So if you look at something like schools and education, the high projection is positive — you'll see growth — but the low projection is negative. Declining enrollment in an elementary school versus increasing enrollment are not variations on a theme. They are drastically different. They're parallel universes.
The way I've always described it: if you're growing but don't know when the growth is going to come, you might carry some financing risk — you need to take on a bit of extra debt and fund those interest payments for a bit longer than you'd like. But if you get the direction wrong and decline rather than grow, that's a funding risk, and a funding risk is very scary. We have this example right now in New Zealand and in many places around the world, where jet fuel has gone through the roof. The US does things and everyone else suffers. The reverberations include high oil prices, and this has infrastructure implications.
If you've got rising prices for a service you're providing as an asset owner, what you're going to see is demand fall. If demand falls and you have fixed costs — you have to maintain the airport, the gates still need to be there — if there are fewer planes flying in, guess what happens to your unit price? It goes up. All of a sudden you're in a terrible cycle of having an asset that you don't have enough users around to fund.
This is a terrifying position for an asset owner to be in. I feel like you've wrestled with this where most of us in North America have not. If we go out and build, say, a new wastewater treatment plant, we just project out how many users we're going to have and put a little extra in. The way we sell this to ourselves and to our funding agencies is along the lines of efficiency.
We kind of know we're going to need a 10% increase, but as long as we're cracking open this project and doing this big thing and rerouting sewage temporarily, we might as well plan for a 50% increase because it's just efficient to do it that way. I remember my engineering days making those arguments — if we're going to put in a quarter mile of pipe, we might as well put in half a mile or a mile, because we're paying the mobilization costs and the per-unit cost goes way down. But all of that relies on a projection of growth.
I feel like there are a lot of local governments that look to the state, look to the Commission, and come to you with projections of growth — maybe realistic, maybe not. How do you have this conversation about risk in a dialog where you also don't want to be anti-growth? You want to help facilitate an increase in GDP, an increase in housing units — how do you wrestle with that tension?
By having a portfolio discussion. Anytime you're looking at one project, you can make this argument: let's just put in a little extra capacity, you never know what might happen. I hear the statement all the time — the only project you ever regret is the one you didn't build, or these things are only going to get more expensive.
You hear that all the time.
That is getting away from the key issue here, which comes back to our work on the forward guidance. We're actually saying that New Zealand is going to spend a significant amount on infrastructure — we spend among the highest in the world as a proportion of GDP for advanced countries. But what we're doing is looking across all of these asset classes. If you come up with an asset where you build out the capacity and the users don't come, that means something for the rest of your portfolio, because you have to maintain that asset — and you probably need to get through a renewal cycle as well, because taking away a service is very difficult.
The way we've framed this is that first, you want to understand at what point your project's unit costs start going underwater — where the cost of maintaining and operating it is way above people's willingness to pay. If you're in that world and it's a publicly provided infrastructure project and you can't take it away, because it's difficult to close down schools — for instance, you planned your treatment facility for 50,000 new users but only ended up with 20,000, and you can't take sewage treatment away from those 20,000 people — you are committed to this project. The money needed to keep that thing open can't go to the hospitals, or other places that actually do have needs.
You can't make these decisions in isolation. You have to be able to see the portfolio of projects, and that's when you start seeing opportunity costs. The other point I'd make is the one about initial economic activity of the project — anytime you do a big build, it needs workers, it needs contractors, it needs subcontractors. There's a lot of economic activity, it creates trades jobs. The rhetoric of this can be persuasive in the decision to invest. Build this roadway, build this transit system — look at all the people that will be employed just in the activity of building it.
One can get carried away with these numbers and lose focus on what it means for the ability of future generations to actually operate the thing. When you do the big economic impact assessments of infrastructure, they tend to lead the public in the direction of: this is a no-brainer. But when you do the financial analysis of the project, it tends to lead you in the direction of: what are we doing?
What you just said is the world that I've struggled with since my early days of engineering. You lay out the project and it's like, oh my gosh, why did we do this yesterday? This is so good — look at all the impacts, look at all the advantages. Then when you say, how are we going to pay to take care of this, the numbers aren't close. They're drastically off. Every time you do a project that's drastically off, it robs your overall capacity.
Then if you're thinking about networked infrastructure — which has a chance of being able to pay for itself off the user — there's a ton of infrastructure out there that has no chance of that. Things I'd put in that category in New Zealand are schools, hospitals, courts, corrections, defense — these have no chance of being able to charge users. They rely on consolidated revenue, tax revenue. If the tax revenue is being pushed out into network sectors, you're going to see problems in the social infrastructure space.
So if we are spending all our money building new roadways, new water systems, new sewer systems that aren't connecting enough users to pay for themselves, you're going to see cuts in schools, cuts in hospitals, cuts in other places. It's not because the government's cheap or stingy — it's because these are all part of the same pot of money. It's coming from the households at the end of the day, and there are limits to what citizens can fund.
Instead of spending six to 7% of GDP — I think in the US it's like two and a half or 3% — you do spend way more on infrastructure here than other parts of the world. We are on a rocky island with volcanoes and tsunamis — there's a reason it costs more to do some of this here. But why not make it 8%, 9%, 10%? Is it just a policy question?
No, I think it's a straight-out affordability question. There are competing priorities for government spend. We have to fund superannuation, we have to fund welfare. Infrastructure is actually relatively small compared to these things. Infrastructure as a service is competing against other priorities. It needs to demonstrate value for people to be prepared to fund it. Let me just say this —
Part of this is a fiscal constraint story. One of the things we've tried to advance is: what would you need to see to believe that households would pay more — say, go up to 8%, 9%, 10%? We've done some work in this space. We looked at a bunch of roads and asked the question: what would you need to see from a road to believe that somebody would be prepared to pay a toll that would fund both the capex and ongoing maintenance? For New Zealand, what that looks like is a road used by about 40,000 vehicles, that costs less than $32 million per kilometer, and that saves you about 15 minutes of travel time. Somewhere within these parameters, you can get a financially viable project.
The projects we're contemplating are really stretching to get to any of those metrics. But there are projects around the world where this seemingly does make sense. The one I've often pointed to is the link between Denmark and Germany — the Fehmarn Belt link, I think it's called — a very expensive underwater project, but it saves about two and a half hours of travel time. People are prepared to pay 73 euros to do that. That's enough to fund the ongoing capital, at least for now.
There are projects that could convince households to spend more, but the proof is in the pudding — does your service generate enough value? When you're originally building out networks, right at the beginning of development, you might go from a day's travel to two hours by car — huge gains. In the world of electricity, you're going from candles to light bulbs — genuinely transformative. When we go back and look at whether people supported those projects, the numbers are overwhelming. In New Zealand, 90% of households said yes for regional electrification, and please tax me — I want light bulbs. Now what we have are projects that are way below that threshold. The benefits are becoming much more marginal — going from two lanes to four lanes gives some benefit, but not a huge amount. Going to six lanes — what does that do for me? It's minutes of travel time saved rather than hours.
I feel like we're asking cities — not just here, but in other places too — to struggle with the idea of a development pattern based less on just instant growth. For many years in the US it was very easy to say, let's build the interchange, let's put in some frontage roads — there was a kind of instant formula for growth. We could just open up this land, make it accessible, get housing out there. I worked with a lot of cities where they felt like they were really smart because they got growth, and I'd say: it was literally just seeds and water we threw on the ground. We just gave you infrastructure and it grew.
I feel like we're asking cities to do something more complex now — I don't want to say engineer things, but there's a part of this that is asking them to be more sophisticated about what they're doing. How do you have that conversation? I think this challenges a lot of consultant business models, a lot of contractor business models, a lot of professional standards — here's how I was taught to recommend things.
One of the examples I was giving earlier today: a lot of times we'll have a block of street and we need to add more housing. The engineer comes out and says, if you add 10 more houses on the street, we've got to dig it up and replace the pipe. I feel like we have to solve that problem somehow — we've got to be able to put in a holding tank and have that holding tank empty when the pipe is at low flow. That's an inelegant, high-cost maintenance solution, but you might have to do that 20 times in a neighborhood before you get the tax base to dig up the pipes and replace them. Are we asking cities to do something different?
I think they have to. It's a question of when. Every city and region is facing a different set of projections and futures they're thinking about.
What is motivating the discussion in New Zealand, and has been for a while, is the fact that you can't forever lean on consolidated revenue to save you — particularly in a world where natural hazards and weather events are getting far more frequent. What these are essentially doing is reducing the renewal cycle. We're having to build the road again and again and again, years before it was going to be up for renewal. This is putting considerable pressure on capital budgets, particularly for smaller places — edge parts of the network with not many people who are relying heavily on lifeline roads that are heavily susceptible to natural hazards. These are pin-up examples of places under extreme pressure.
The impetus is coming from that direction. For folks in the world of planning, having to think much more clearly about what is financially viable for a city — this is challenging, particularly for planners. We plan our cities with zoning ordinances that say growth can go here and growth can go there, but we don't think about what the financial viability of the infrastructure required to sustain that kind of development actually is.
New Zealand suffers the same problem that America and many other countries face, which is that we don't like letting people build high density around each other. That means we push development into further dispersed locations, and those locations are very difficult to service with infrastructure, because infrastructure benefits from economies of scale. It is far more friend than foe to density. This is particularly challenging because I've been talking about areas that are declining, but now I'm talking about a situation where we do have growth — but we're growing in a way that is undermining the financial viability of the infrastructure as well.
A lot of people think growth might be a way out. What we're saying is: maybe, but if you do it the wrong way, things might get worse. That's a hard message for people. The ones who see this most are those trying to maintain these assets. We need to get closer to the asset owners — they see this stuff every day. They can see that they're not getting the funding into the maintenance of it. We need to bring them much closer into the conversation, certainly the planning conversation. The number of times I see planning documents go through, only for the finance people or infrastructure folks to look at what it means for them afterwards and say, hang on — we're not sure this adds up.
That's fascinating. I wrote an article years ago about a dam in California and tried to make this exact case — that there's something deeply unsexy about maintenance. If you are a young engineer, do you want the job where you can build the brand new bridge, or do you want to maintain the earthen dam? There's a natural desire to do the big exciting thing. We have to find a way to elevate those maintenance people to a position of prominence — they can't be siloed off in a backwater and not listened to, because they literally have their finger on the pulse. Maintenance is the biggest mega project we have.
That's a great way to put it. If you kick the can on maintenance, it just gets worse. When I look at some of the high-performing sectors, what I would say about them is that their asset management person is not tier five. Their asset management person is the same person thinking about capital upgrades. Asset management and investment planning have to be one and the same thing. But so often in many sectors the project is almost just tacked on — the project director is reporting to the CE and getting a lot of prominence. These are the right questions: where are these people in the organization? What prominence are they getting? How are they making the case that if we don't maintain this, you're up for a much bigger price down the line?
I actually feel like the awards we tend to give in the States for people who do grand things should really go to the people who are doing the prudent management of the asset — you saved us millions of dollars by just taking care of the thing we asked you to take care of. It's when these things go wrong that you realize how important the assets we already have around us actually are.
Let me ask you kind of a last question about — I don't want to say politics, but maybe that is where I'm actually going. In the US, we can't have a conversation about the weather without having two teams at each other's throats. When we get into infrastructure, we have this rural-urban divide — one team is for transit, one team is for roadways.
The thing that has been the most refreshing to me is the dialog I've had here — watching you and others have these conversations. I think bipartisan is the wrong word, but when you set out the constraints, I don't see it becoming a partisan fight where someone is going to deny those constraints from their political perspective. I don't know if that's a Kiwi way of doing things, or if it's the way things have been presented, but talk a little bit about how the plan has been received, and how — I don't want to make this too grandiose — but how it has transcended politics in a way. I do feel like there's a certain amount of reality you have to deal with here on this island that maybe has not quite reached the United States in the way we talk about things.
New Zealand has, in the past, dreamed really big, and we've tripped over a few times. We haven't been able to deliver really big projects that we perhaps wanted. For a long time, the presumption was that it was just because we couldn't get agreement across party political lines. Increasingly, as we've dug away at this, we've realized that the issue is not about political agreement on projects — it's actually about understanding the constraints you start with. If you have a good understanding of what your non-renewals budget is and see that line item for what it is — which is actually pretty narrow — it can cut across a lot of rhetoric and focus the mind.
There has been a perception that there's a lot of money out there in infrastructure, and some projects are getting it and some aren't. At least in the New Zealand setting, I think that's a false characterization. All networks are under pressure, and the household balance sheet is under pressure. Funding these things anywhere is quite difficult, particularly when you understand the renewals part of the equation.
To answer your question on how it's been received: a lot of the headlines have been along the lines of a sobering read on New Zealand's infrastructure. It has been received by everybody quite well. People commonly tell me that we seem to have political
consensus on the plan. But there is this kind of, oh, it's a sobering thing.
I turn that around — I don't think it's sobering at all. We're in a world where people still want to come and live in New Zealand. We're an attractive place. We've got good, stable governance and good institutions. What the plan sets out is that we've spent a lot of time debating fiercely over a range of projects that we can't afford. The plan sets out what we can afford and lets us galvanize around that, rather than hypothetical things we can't.
It's a very serious approach. I've been incredibly impressed with you and your team and the report, and really with the political leadership I've been able to meet with here too — very thoughtful people. It's been pretty astounding.
We're thankful for your involvement, Chuck. You came out last June for the launch of the draft plan, and I still get folks coming to talk to me about the presentation you gave.
That's so cool. That means a lot. You got some Strong Towns language in the plan's scheme as an actual description.
I think we did. To finish this — I think people actually are up for these discussions if you give them good information. That's my overwhelming experience here: with good information, people are actually prepared to get around the table. I'm optimistic about that and about the direction as a result.
The last time I was here, you took me on a hike.
I did, and it was one of the more memorable ones. We went on a hike in a fantastic part of Wellington. Wellington, of course, is a city in a harbor, but it is surrounded by mountains that you can easily reach within a few minutes.
We were surrounded by fog — extraordinary views, but no more than about 10 meters of visibility at the time. We went in a rainstorm, which I don't think is uncommon in June. June is your winter. So we were winter hiking up the side of a mountain — spectacular views, but very Antarctic. I tried to eat a pie beforehand.
You did. I tried to give you a pie beforehand, but you didn't go for that. We had a great time. I recall that you got back, packed your clothes, and got on the plane, and by the time you got home your wet clothes had about 20-some hours of travel to marinate in, and your wife was not impressed with the ripeness of your decor.
We'll see this time. I'm here in March, which is your summer, and the weather is quite beautiful. I'm going to try to do some hiking again. Jeff, thanks for taking the time. Thanks for all you do. Everybody, thanks for listening. Before we head out, I'm going to keep a copy of the plan on the site so people can read it. Is there a place — a website or something — people could go to get more information?
The New Zealand Infrastructure Commission — if you just Google that, you'll go straight to the national infrastructure plan. We're also known by our Māori name: Te Waihanga. The website is tewaihanga.govt.nz. This is one of the more beautiful things about being here — getting everything in two languages, one that I kind of understand and one that I don't, but it's very beautiful.
I was trying to describe the Māori language to my kids. I said it's very thick, very strong.
We're very fond of our Māori name. It means cornerstone, which speaks to how the institution thinks about itself and the system in which we operate.
Very beautiful. Thanks, friend. Thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Talk again soon.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.