On the evening of Monday 19th July, Waikato District Council (WDC) planners attended a public meeting to answer questions about the proposed Raglan Town Plan (Structure Plan).
The email below was today sent by Peter Storey (Chair of the Raglan Community Board) to the WDC executive team.
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The meeting last night was very interesting and your staff held their own well.
It did, for me, highlight the need to stop the process to get it right!
Staff stated it was the legal process and couldn’t be stopped or extended…. I take issue with this!
The Council started the process and only they can stop it, I am sure it is not without precedent and can’t imagine who would challenge them.
They could easily demonstrate they got it wrong need to go back to get it right. Stopping at this point would be far cheaper and quicker to put in place than deal with all the challenges this throws up.
I know Council has major issues with admitting mistakes but in this case I am sure you will agree they need to.
The rule changes identified could be got around through the submission process I think however the zoning issues are a major problem.
Staff’s answer to all the issues was to submit.
If submissions are made on the zoning issues the planners have left themselves nowhere to go. Logic would dictate the Commissioners would take the community view.
ie.
The two light industrial issues:
The plan is completely reliant on the Tasman Lands site going ahead. There is a very real possibility that this will not happen. The Resource Consent may not be issued, NZTA make a very compelling case and with that in mind, even if issued, the conditions of the consent would probably be too costly for the developer to complete. (roading upgrade etc). Couple this with the intention to rezone the Park Drive as Living Zone, the outcome would be Raglan with no Industrial site at all, when one of the main drivers for the community was to provide employment opportunities through industrial areas being opened up.
This would leave us way worse off than we are currently and no affordable alternative.
There needs to be a fall back site or two in the plan and not one just put in without consultation with affected parties. This happened with the Business zone extension and this too has had no logic applied.
The Planners have chosen the most expensive land in town to extend the business zone into. This does nothing for employment as potential developers would do their sums and go somewhere else. To unilaterally put a road through three very expensive properties and state that a developer will spend the millions buying these properties and build a road only to vest it in Council shows how far removed these planners are from business today. Any developer who didn’t see the futility of the exercise immediately, would see the road has no cost benefit to him and it wouldn’t go ahead.
The affected parties in this area have been totally put upon, this will affect their property values hugely and there are no winners here, now or in the future!
So again with this in mind the Commissioners would probably take the community view and we would be left with nothing again.
The business zone needed to be extended in more than one direction so we had somewhere else to go and in this case somewhere more affordable so that the community has a fighting chance to solve employment issues.
Stopping the process and dealing with these issues through proper consultation with, at the very least, the affected parties will go some way towards getting a community buy in and result in a more workable and robust document
Thanks
Regards
Peter Storey
Raglan Community Board