Te Pātukurea Kerikeri Waipapa Spatial Plan

Kia Ora

FNDC held an extraordinary meeting to consider the Kerikeri/Waipapa Spatial Plan following the last round of public consultation in May. The Spatial Plan is a belated effort to undertake some planning at last for Kerikeri/Waipapa where planning has essentially been ad hoc under our extremely lax effects-based District Plan. The Spatial Plan is high-level document intended to indicate where growth for Kerikeri/Waipapa should occur over the next 30 years. Six Options A to F were put forward by Council planners for consideration. At the public hearing, Vision Kerikeri, Our Kerikeri, Kapiro Conservation Trust and Carbon Neutral NZ Trust jointly strongly advocated for the inclusion of Option F (the Brownlie/KiwiFresh property bordering SH10 between the KK Golf Club and abutting the new sports fields at Waipapa). This was initially omitted from the discussion documents but included in the final public consultation document after strong advocacy by community groups, including Vision Kerikeri.

This month, the Council adopted the Spatial Plan, including Option F as a Contingent Future Growth Area with strict conditions. You can view the adopted plan at this link: https://www.fndc.govt.nz/Whats-New/current-projects/kerikeri-waipapa-spatial-plan

At the extraordinary meeting Council has overridden the planners' recommendation to omit Option F from consideration. Planners’ opposition was a very conservative and risk-averse position, and would remove the greenfield development entirely from consideration for the next 30 years and effectively strategically in practical terms, forever. The imposed conditions by the Council are reasonable, because there are some issues that need to be addressed, as pointed out by the combined Community groups in their submissions at the public hearing – the need for appropriate stormwater management and flood prevention (for the entire Waipapa area) due to risks from flooding in 100 year events now coming at more frequent intervals, and the need for safeguards to ensure the developer will deliver the necessary infrastructure. The Brownlie property must be rezoned from Rural Production to Residential and Mixed Use, and a dispute with the Kerikeri Golf Club needs to be solved to enable connectivity to the CBD.

The Commissioners of the Proposed District Plan Hearings can now consider Option F for the requested rezoning. As we understand it, the Commissioners will need to consider a Plan Change to give effect to the Spatial Plan. Without the recent Council decision Option F might have been doomed except by legal challenge by the developer, which would hold up the District Plan for more years; it is already long overdue.

Council has approved development in Options D & E as recommended by the planning staff. While the staff report on public submissions attempted to refute every aspect of the Community groups' submission about Option F, the report failed to adequately consider traffic increases along Waipapa and Kerikeri Roads linked by the Heritage Bypass bridge. It is considered that this could be managed by increasing lanes on the Heritage Bypass and some roundabout improvements and depended on the Council Transport Strategy which we have challenged. In fact, we have referred it to the Local Body Ombudsman since the Council has declined to release the data on which it is based.

The Spatial Plan includes a chapter on implementation, and together with the other groups, we will request for involvement with a bottom-up consultation procedure rather than the top-down approach used so far, so that the ideas, expectations and concerns of community groups will be considered from the start.

Ngā manaakitanga

Rolf Mueller-Glodde

-Acting Chair-