A Tarras company’s venture to subdivide farmland near the township should be rejected, Central Otago District Council planning consultant Emma Spalding says.
Ms Spalding has recommended the council’s resource consent hearing panel turn down Cluden Station Ltd’s application for a five-lot subdivision on the grounds it would have more than minor adverse effects on the land’s character and productivity and could undermine the integrity of the district plan.
The largest lot of 148.69ha represents the farm. The other four lots would be just over 2ha each and accessed from Munro Lane.
"The proposal will provide for the social and economic wellbeing of the applicant, and will provide an additional four rural-residential properties to the district’s housing resource, but I do not consider that it will provide for the wide community’s and future generations’ need to utilise the district’s soil resources to provide for social, economic and cultural wellbeing," Ms Spalding said in her report to the panel.
The subdivision did not meet the district plan’s 8ha average lot size rule for rural areas.
The four new lots would fragment highly productive soil and lead to a change in character from working rural land to domesticated, lifestyle character, she said.
Cluden Station’s consultant landscape architect Mike Moore said in a report adverse effects would be no more than minor, "largely due to significant screening by [an] existing large shelter belt".
The applicants have presented a landscape management plan and offered conditions to manage the effects of development.
Ms Spalding said she was concerned the development could have cumulative effects in the rural resource area and create a precedent for other similar consents in that zone. She drew attention to the district plan’s objective to maintain the life-supporting capacity of soil for present and future generations.
She also referred the panel to the recently released state of the environment report Environment Aotearoa 2022, which records a 54% increase in unavailability of highly productive land between 2002 and 2019.
Under the Resource Management Act, a non-complying activity needed to be a "true exception" to get consent.
"This subdivision was not a true exception and granting consent would set an undesirable precedent that could undermine the plan’s integrity," Ms Spalding said.
A panel comprising Councillors Neil Gillespie (chairman), Martin McPherson and Stephen Jeffery will consider the application on June 14.
