Queenstown Lakes district councillors were regaled with more freedom camping horror stories at their full meeting yesterday.
Before voting on a recommendation by council staff to begin preparing a new freedom camping bylaw, they were given graphic descriptions of "inexcusable" behaviour by budget travellers in Queenstown during the past summer.
Speaking during the meeting’s public forum, Pinewood Lodge owner Rob Greig said freedom campers were camping on nearby streets, coming into his lodge for free showers and stealing items from the communal kitchens.
"These people are cunning.
"They use the internet to talk to one another, and they know where to go."
On Park St, where he lived, he had been forced to cut short walks with his dog several times, after it rolled in human excrement on the lake shore, Mr Greig said.
He regularly counted between 30 and 40 freedom camping vehicles parked on his street, many of them unregistered or unwarranted.
He had seen the vehicles’ occupants using soap to bathe in the lake.
"The days of calling Queenstown pure and being able to trade on this clean, green image have well gone."
Longtime Queenstown resident Erna Spijkerbosch told councillors freedom campers were parking outside homes "night after night" and using the streets and lake shore as "toilets and rubbish pits".
They were "urinating into the bushes and gardens" residents all attended to, "cleaning their teeth in the gutters, blocking the footpaths, hanging their washing out", Mrs Spijkerbosch said.
"This isn’t freedom camping, it’s free camping."
Councillors then discussed a report by staff that said more freedom campers, along with limited enforcement options caused by the quashing of the district’s freedom camping bylaw by the High Court last year, were making it difficult to tackle the issue.
The bylaw, which effectively imposed a ban on freedom camping on council-owned or managed land across the district, was ruled invalid by the court because of a technical flaw in its consultation process, after a legal challenge by the New Zealand Motor Caravan Association.
It meant enforcement officers had been limited to pinging freedom campers for traffic and parking bylaw breaches and issuing infringements under national reserve and freedom camping legislation.
The report’s author, council policy adviser Luke Place, said a new bylaw could be ready for councillors to approve by September, following "expert assessments" and community consultation.
Mayor Glyn Lewers asked staff how many fines had been issued to freedom campers for things such as toileting in parks, spitting out toothpaste and hanging clotheslines.
When told a few fines had been issued for dumping rubbish, he said it seemed "everyone else" was catching the freedom campers, apart from them.
The district needed a freedom camping bylaw in place so it could "go into next summer with [its] boxing gloves on".
Cr Niki Gladding said the community would "expect a response" to its concerns, and more resources would have to go into enforcement once a new bylaw was in place.
Councillors unanimously agreed to go ahead with progressing a new bylaw.
