by Geoffrey Churchman

Over 200 people showed up at the Waikanae Bowling Club yesterday evening to hear speakers hostile to the development of the lot occupying 14-16 Ngarara Road: the new owners plan to clear everything on it and build 20 new dwelling units which KCDC’s planning officer has given the ‘green light’ to. The businessmen chopped down the trees even before submitting their planning application.

The speakers yesterday evening covered a range of specialist occupations on the issues involved — architecture, town planning, habitat design and the complex resource management laws that the country has, as well as the alarming Plan Change 2 that KCDC Councilors passed on a split vote which now allows this sort of this thing to happen.

As regards 14-16 Ngarara Road, the legal expert who spoke said the only avenue available now to stop it is to apply for a Judicial Review in the High Court of the Consent and there is little chance of it succeeding — even though the Council’s planning officer did not notify it, which morally if not legally she should have, she did consider what she was required to under the new laws; and didn’t consider anything she was not required to.

The major task ahead of Waikanae people is stopping 14-16 Ngarara Road becoming a precedent for similar developments, as there is almost nothing to stop them now.

Cr Nigel Wilson said that the new fast-tracked housing that was announced by the central government last week in Kapiti contains 10 times the number on the Housing NZ (a.k.a. Kainga Ora) waiting list for Kapiti, which stands at 260 presently. This means there will no longer be a housing shortage in Kapiti when they are completed; instead there will be a housing surplus.

Nigel also mentioned that while Kapiti is treated a Tier 1 district for urban housing intensification — as are Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and Hamilton — it is not a Tier 1 district for Health services and all the future residents will not have any except a few local doctors and pharmacies.

How did this happen? Even the previous Mayor Gurunathan was a supporter of protecting the Waikanae Garden Precinct, see here. What present Mayor Holborow thinks is unknown and she didn’t attend the meeting (neither did CEO Darren Edwards).

At the time the council was considering Plan Change 2 it commissioned a study on the Special Character of the Garden Precinct in 2022 which can be read/downloaded here. It was a good report — but the council ignored it.

The next stage that the meeting was in unanimous support of is to form an incorporated society and then invite membership to create the new pressure group.

The main thing that the new Society can do apart from publicity and agitation is to file for a Private Plan Change to put into the KCDC District Plan the protections it omitted. The cost of that is put at about $14,000 which should not be a problem as Coastal Ratepayers United managed to quickly raise $20,000 last November to pay for studies to challenge what the KCDC obtained from its consultants (at an unbelievable cost of $580,000.)

It is expected that the Waikanae Garden Precinct Protection Society will be formed quickly and the action strategy commenced.

On my walk back home, I spoke to an attendee who pointed out that the large tree and garden covered property named Leybourne immediately east of the Waikanae Bowling Club, which has featured on the Lions Garden Trails, is exactly what greedy property businessmen will want to get their hands on.