The council bought the 328ha property last year, at the insistence of peninsula residents, to prevent it from being subdivided into small rural blocks.
Steering group chairman Cr Dave Cull said a draft plan would go to the council before the end of the year and it would then go out for public consultation.
Consultants had come up with about six options and the group's preferred option, which would be recommended to the council, was for "some residential development but not very much", he said.
He declined to provide details of the proposal before it had been considered by the council but believed the group had created a vision for Harbour Cone "that really goes beyond, perhaps, just the instinctive impulse on the part of so many of us to protect it".
"I think we've come up with something that will not only protect it but will allow sustainable opportunities into the future."
Cr Cull believed there were tourism opportunities and the property's heritage values were enhanced by its dairy-farming history.
He also felt how the council dealt with the issues relating to Harbour Cone could provide a template for changes to the district plan.
City planners were looking at rural aspects of the plan.
"So this has helped everybody understand better the kinds of things we are going to have to contend with over the whole peninsula.
"The old district plan basically let you build a house for every 15ha and a lot of groups in the community would say, `Well, do we really want a big house plonked every however many hundred metres'.
"In some ways, the district plan wasn't so much a solution to anything."
He believed the plan for Harbour Cone could be "an exemplar" of how communities dealt with big blocks of land on the edge of urban areas.
