Call for more rules on landscape care

The Queenstown Lakes District Council has given the green light to a district plan variation that aims to halt undesirable incremental development in the Wakatipu Basin.

Now the Upper Clutha Environmental Society is calling for the same protection for the Upper Clutha basin.

However, the council has not committed to do that, preferring instead to wait for a decision from the independent district plan review panel next year.

The Queenstown Lakes District Council approved proposed Chapter

24 Wakatipu Basin and associated new zones at a meeting on November 8 and will call for public submissions before hearing the case next year.

Recommendations include creating a Wakatipu Basin rural amenity zone with a minimum lot size of

80 hectares.

This worries the Upper Clutha Environmental Society spokesman Julian Haworth, although he supports Chapter 24.

‘‘The Wakatipu study will push people our way and make things more complicated,’’ he said.

‘‘They won’t be able to get what they want in the Wakatipu because of the 80ha minimum lot size rule.

‘It will be non-complying to get resource consent,’’ Haworth said.

‘‘It is a huge protection for the Wakatipu but not for Wanaka,’’ he said.

The council-commissioned Wakatipu landscape study was prompted by the district plan review panel, which in July last year issued a minute to the council stating further Wakatipu Basin development had potential to ‘‘cumulatively and irreversibly damage’’ the basin’s rural character and amenity values.

The panel made a preliminary conclusion the discretionary regime would not achieve district plan strategies.

Haworth acknowledged the panel had not issued a similar minute to the council about the Upper Clutha Basin.

He estimated more than 1000 residential building platforms existed for the rural Wakatipu Basin, while about 450 had been consented in recent years for the rural Upper Clutha basin.

He predicted that, in another 15 years’ time, Upper Clutha Basin rural developments could rise to 1000, if the council failed to act.

Council planning policy manager Ian Bayliss said at the November 8 council meeting that a landscape analysis for the Upper Clutha Basin ‘‘might recommend similar provision but it might not’’.

‘‘It’s not a matter of using these as a cookie cutter elsewhere.’’