High Court appearance for camp

Plans for a modern-day children’s health camp in a well-to-do Paraparaumu subdivision will have to clear two legal hurdles as well as some neighbourhood opposition.

Stand Children’s Services, a charity, wants a replacement for its long-time Otaki site, and chief executive Fiona Inkpen said it thought it had found its ‘‘fairytale castle’’ at 132 Milne Drive, Paraparaumu.

Stand has the 1.8-hectare property under a conditional offer for an undisclosed sum. It has a nearly 1200sqm house, private lake, tennis court, and swimming pool.

But the property has a legal covenant dating from 1999 that limits commercial and industrial uses for buildings. Stand has asked a High Court judge to rule that its health camp proposal would not amount to commercial or industrial use.

The charity, which is government-funded, provides care and education to children aged between 5 and 12, ‘‘who are at significant risk of harm to their wellbeing as a consequence of the environment in which they are being raised and their own complex needs’’.

They stay at the charity’s children’s villages for five weeks at a time in groups of about 20.

In the High Court at Wellington, Stand’s lawyer Paul Withnall said the plan was to use the property as if it was a large extended family setting, where children would be reared, cared for and educated.

Although Stand employed staff, its core was not commercial, he said.

Justice Simon France said he understood the merit, worth and value of what Stand did, but his job was to interpret the law, not decide whether it would be a good use for the land.

A group of neighbours opposed Stand’s application, for reasons that included a perceived lack of detail in the proposal.

For some of the neighbours, lawyer John Maassen said the covenant was to protect the residential environment. Commercial did not have to mean for-profit.

Stand’s plans include a reception, office, and meeting rooms. It involved an intensity of activity that was far more than was allowed under the covenant, with up to 17 of its 40 staff working at one time, Maassen said.

Kapiti Coast District Council said the question in the court case was different to the application for resource consent currently before the council. The meaning of ‘‘commercial’’ was different in the covenant and the council’s District Plan.

The court heard the wording of the covenant was the same for more than 140 properties in the area, although some were zoned residential and others rural.

Stand’s contract to buy the property is conditional on getting the court ruling and resource consent it needs by late August.