At an additional council meeting yesterday, Waitaki district councillors unanimously decided to push on with public consultation on the future of Forrester Heights, and approved the final options to put to the public: sell all or part of the land; undertake work to establish the land as a reserve; or do nothing and continue to hold the land as endowment for capital gains.
It was important for the community to have their say on what the future of the land should look like, Mr Kircher said.
"This is a can of worms that keeps getting opened every few years, and it keeps driving division in the community around what should happen with that bit of land," he said.
"It is time to make a decision one way or the other about what the future of that land will be so that we stop having this discussion."
Several different options for the future of the land were assessed by council officers, and in a report, tabled at yesterday’s meeting, it was stated there would be "significant obstacles" to establishing the land as a reserve, due to its current endowment status. In the report, council officers said the only way of establishing Forrester Heights as reserve or similar would be to petition Parliament to remove the current endowment status through enactment of law.
Advocacy group Friends of Oamaru Harbour believed the report had been "strongly biased in favour of selling the land to a developer". The group has proposed that the land, which it has named "Harbour Hill", should be reforested in native trees to serve as a recreational and biodiversity asset for the community, which would provide a link between Lookout Point and Oamaru Harbour.
Co-ordinator Vicki Jayne criticised the council for ignoring the group’s proposal, which she submitted to councillors on February 3, and denying group members the opportunity to discuss it in public forums.
"This is something that will engage the whole community ... and I just think would be a beautiful option for the hill," she said.
There were too many unanswered questions over what a sale and development of the land would look like, she said.
The group has organised a "Get to know Harbour Hill" day on Saturday, from 10am-2pm, to discuss their proposal with the community.
Forrester Heights, the council’s property overlooking Oamaru Harbour, has been debated since 2004, when the council decided to subdivide it to help pay for community projects, including the $10 million redevelopment of the Oamaru Opera House. More than half of the sections had been sold when the council discovered it could not issue titles nor go ahead with selling the rest until reserve status over some of the land was lifted.
It took until 2013 for the Waitaki District Council Reserves and Other Land Empowering Act to clarify the status of the land as endowment, overturning a clerical mistake from 1937 which had classified the area as reserve land. In the same year the Act was passed, the now-defunct Waitaki Ratepayers and Concerned Citizens Association presented then-Waitaki mayor Alex Familton with a petition containing more than 700 signatures supporting Forrester Heights becoming a reserve "never [to] be built on".
It is back in the spotlight after the council announced last year there had been approaches by several parties interested in buying it for development.
The timeline for the public consultation process is still being worked on, but council communications specialist Lisa Scott said it was likely to be "another week or two" before all the documents were ready.
