Organisers of Bluff’s oyster festival are angry that a four-year unresolved battle with the Invercargill City Council over a dangerous building has resulted in the cancellation of the event next year.
Bluff Oyster and Food Festival committee member Kylie Fowler said the decision to cancel the festival was not made lightly, but it was the only option as the site had been declared a dangerous building area by the council.
The council wants the Bluff Oyster and Food Festival Charitable Trust to look at alternative uses for the building, the heritage listed category 2 Club Hotel, which borders the site of the festival.
"In light of an engineer’s report we provided to Invercargill City Council, the Dangerous and Insanitary Building Notice was issued requiring demolition [of the Club Hotel] by March 16, 2023," Ms Fowler said.
"We were confident we could achieve that and have the current site ready for the 2023 event.
"Unfortunately, Invercargill City Council amended their previous notice and the process now required will mean the dangerous Club Hotel will still be looming over the site in May 2023."
After a resource consent hearing in 2019 to knock down the Club Hotel, commissioner Peter Constantine has declined the application, saying he was concerned by a "significant lack of detail in the application to be able to definitively rule out the potential for alternative outcomes" for the building.
In August this year, the council had said the building should be demolished.
Then, in the middle of this year, the council subsequently requested a structural engineer’s assessment of the entire building.
After being supplied the report, the council then issued a Dangerous and Insanitary Building Notice in August 2022 requesting the building be demolished by March 2023.
However, that was amended this month to reflect a range of options available to the trust based on information from similar situations that other councils had experienced, she said.
"These options were presented to the trust, which included retaining and repairing the building in a second, amended notice, which was issued in December 2022," Ms Hurst said.
The trust submitted a new application for a further resource consent to demolish the entire building, however it had not met all criteria to meet the standards of the Resource Management Act 1991.
"Owning a building — and in this case an older commercial building with heritage status — comes with many responsibilities for owners under these Acts," Mr Hurst said.
"Council staff have been engaged with the owners for some time and sympathise with the challenges they face.
"We know how important the Bluff Oyster Festival is to the community and we will continue to support the trust in finding a resolution."
Ms Fowler said the trust felt frustrated the council was asking them to once again apply for resource consent and go through the whole public notification process again.
The trust already had all of those reports and the information required, she said, and did not understand why they would need to do the same thing again.
The organisation was run by volunteers and they had spent more than $80,000 — almost all of the profit made at the festival — when they applied for the consent last time around.
She said organisers were not sure why the council was creating more hurdles for what it deemed as a dangerous site. However, in the meantime, the trust would continue to work to sort the issue and make the 2024 festival "bigger and better".
