By Amy Williams, RNZ
Auckland Council has started to inform owners of the worst-affected flood damaged homes that they are eligible for a buyout.
The city's recovery office deputy manager, Mace Ward, said this week 25 homeowners in Muriwai had been advised they fall into category three.
He said the office aimed to advise between 20 to 50 homeowners of their buyout category each week.
"We will be focusing on those areas that have the highest impact where people aren't able to live in their homes," Ward said.
"We are also making the best attempts we can to focus on individual communities, where people are displaced from their home, they're displaced from their communities. They are high priority."
The buyout offers will be based on a market appraisal for 26 January - before the storms.
Mace said homeowners in category three for buyouts would be provided with information and invited to a meeting with a property advisor, ahead of any valuation.
Category three property owners would also receive $5000 funding towards professional fees, such as legal advice or an alternative valuation.
"We'll be inviting people to meetings within the next week but any settlement in the valuation, we'll allow people to have that cooling off period," he said.
"If a settlement offer is made there's a period of three months we'd expect a response back by."
Muriwai homeowner Caroline Bell-Booth is among the 25 who have received confirmation they would be eligible for a home buyout.
She said more information was needed on the valuation methodology.
"I still genuinely hold a flicker of hope that if a fair and equitable offer is offered, essentially leaving me in a financial position where I can replace like for like, that I can still resolve this before Christmas."
Sense of frustration' for some in West Auckland
West Auckland Is Flooding spokesperson Lyall Carter said people in his community were waiting anxiously for buyout confirmations.
Although he understood the logistics of assessing properties was time consuming, the speed of the process was concerning, he said.
"There is a real sense of frustration that we are now in November, we're nearly at Christmas and it doesn't look like Santa is coming for quite a number of the flood impacted homeowners and that they would have to have Christmas away from their homes."
Meanwhile, Auckland Council has agreed to pay for mitigation work on private properties where the home can be lived in, if the risk of flooding or landslides is reduced.
Council will fund work such as retaining walls up to a quarter of the property's capital value - meaning a home worth $1 million could have work costing up to $250,000.
Ward said this was for homes in category 2-P, deemed liveable if mitigation work is done on property.
"They [the remedial projects] could be as simple as a retaining wall... diverting water away from a home, it could be lifting the vents on a house so that water doesn't flow underneath the house, even to the point of lifting the house itself."
It was welcome news for Carter, who said West Auckland Is Flooding had been advocating for such funding.
"It's a real celebration for us that those people in that particular category won't be any further put out of pocket or at risk of having to walk away from everything because they can't afford the mitigation and so they can't afford to live there."
To qualify for the funding the mitigation work would need to be completed within two years.
Ward said there were two things the council needed to consider for these mitigations - including whether such work was possible.
"For example, that means looking at whether there's enough space to construct a retaining wall, or whether the nature of the house means it can actually be raised," he said.
"The second part to feasibility is whether it's affordable and if it can be delivered in a reasonable timeframe. Whilst anything is possible if you have enough money, we needed to put a realistic and responsible cap on what could be spent on a mitigation."
Council documents show it expected to spend up to $10m demolishing between 80 and 200 flood damaged homes after they were bought out.
Councillors signed off $7.5m in unbudgeted funding last week, for demolitions this financial year.
A report to council showed each demolition was expected to cost around $50,000.
It said that council will need to pay for most of the demolition costs, because they were excluded by the Crown from the $2 billion dollar cost-sharing buyout package for hundreds of uninhabitable properties and other storm-related costs.
Council will also pay for security until houses can be removed and made safe.
For homeowners still waiting for a category, Ward said the recovery office was focused on getting assessments completed as quickly as possible.
More than 2100 home owners have voluntarily opted into the categorisation scheme and of those, more than 1300 desktop assessments and 870 site visits have been completed.
Around 200 low risk property owners have been identified and already been informed of their category one status.
