Blessing for end of walking track saga
It was the walking track that split a community but it should soon be a faint line on a hillside.
Hastings District Council will this week begin work on filling in the lowest stretch of the 1.8-kilometre track up the eastern face of Te Mata Peak, which was cut by Craggy Range winery in 2017. About 1.3km of track needs to be filled in.
The intention was to start yesterday, with machinery on site, but it has been delayed until tomorrow or Thursday due to bad weather.
It is expected to take about a month to complete.
The council had granted consent for the track without local iwi being informed. It sparked an outcry and split the local community between those for and against the track. The furore prompted the winery to say it would remove the track.
It later said it couldn’t remove the track so the council stepped in and said it would.
The council was granted resource consent in June to remove the track at an estimated cost to ratepayers of $650,000.
A proposal by three local businessmen to buy a large block of land on the eastern side of the peak to turn it into a regional park is still to be finalised.
Mike Wilding, Andy Lowe and Jonathan McHardy said they would buy the land from Jeff Drabble and Felicity Dobell Brown so it could be turned into a regional park, administered by a newly formed trust.
Te Rongo Charitable Trust applied to the council to subdivide the land in order to create the park, which would cover about 50 hectares. But the council has returned the trust’s application because it failed to include various pieces of information. One of these was the detail showing there had been genuine and meaningful consultation with tangata whenua.
Founding trustees of the new trust are Nga¯ ti Kahungunu chairman Ngahiwi Tomoana and Hawke’s Bay Regional Council chairman Rex Graham. Hapu and marae representing the mana whenua will be 50 per cent partners in the new park with the regional council.
Graham said Tomoana was in the process of talking to hapu and marae.
If the application to subdivide was not granted the purchase was unlikely to proceed.
Hastings Mayor Sandra Hazlehurst attended the blessing with iwi and hapu members and council staff.
She said the cost of remediation included $300,000 on a study of all wahi tapu sites.