The most important question to be addressed by the Wanaka Community Board on Tuesday is: where do Wanaka people want new sports fields, a swimming pool and a camping ground?
The issues promise to be a hot agenda item for the board meeting when the Wanaka sports facilities working party discussion document will be debated.
The agenda item is of high public interest because it affects prominent open areas at Pembroke Park and the Wanaka Showgrounds and the Wanaka Lakeview Holiday Park.
The holiday park lease expires in 2010 and some people have suggested the camping ground should make room for sports fields and gymnasium.
The working party prefers a centre-of-town site for a sports facilities hub over three others, although it acknowledges the preferred site could affect the future of summer campers.
The second preferred site is on a greenfield site on Ballantyne Rd.
Also, the sports facilities working party has invited the separate Wanaka Aquatic Centre working party to revise its plans for a swimming pool on Kellys Flat and join the sports hub, wherever it is decided that should be.
Kellys Flat and Lismore Park have also been considered as sports hub sites by the sports facilities working party.
Board chairman Lyal Cocks said yesterday he hoped for a full public forum at the beginning of the 9am meeting.
The board and sports facilities working party have a tight time-frame in which to get the sports hub idea into the draft 10-year long-term council community plan by the end of the year.
"The showgrounds is one of the options and is what the working party has emphasised, but it is still only one of the options. That's why we have to get discussions, to see what people think of that," Cr Cocks said.
He accepted, when asked, that the work done by the aquatic centre party to identify Kellys Flat as the public's preferred swimming pool site could be made redundant by the sports facilities party proposal.
Expert advice had been that co-location of swimming pools with other sports facilities was increasingly common throughout the country, he said.
The aquatic centre working party chairman, Leigh Stock, could not be contacted for comment yesterday.
Sports facilities working party chairman Mike Saunders said yesterday, when contacted, the community needed to start thinking about sports facilities and the best use of available land.
The aquatic centre party had been consulted and was thinking about issues of co-location, he said.
