Submissions on stadium top 25,000

Preliminary results from public submissions on the future of Christchurch’s planned stadium could be released as early as Thursday.

The Christchurch City Council is canvassing the public about how it should respond to last month’s revelation that the 30,000-seat covered stadium had blown its budget by $150 million to $683m.

Some 25,650 people had made a submission by yesterday – the highest number for any public consultation in the city since the post-earthquake Share An Idea campaign in 2012, which attracted about 106,000 responses. Submissions close at 11.59pm today. Councillors will decide on July 14 whether to spend the money and push on, pause and redesign, or scrap the stadium altogether.

Views over the future of the project have been mixed.

On Friday, Christchurch mayoral candidate David Meates said building a covered stadium would be ‘‘an enormous cost for a relatively limited return’’.

He called for a pause on the project, saying an election period was not the time for the council to impose such an ‘‘enormous expense’’ on the city without clarity ‘‘on how we will pay’’.

Fellow mayoral candidate Phil Mauger initially suggested a pause to the project, but now says the contractor would put the price up if the council did not go ahead.

‘‘I’m very comfortable we can find the money to make it work,’’ he said.

Current mayor Lianne Dalziel is not standing for a fourth term, but last month said: ‘‘The sooner we get on with it, the better.’’

A spokesperson said the council was ‘‘very confident’’ that all the submissions would be analysed in time for the July 14 meeting. ‘‘We have been processing and coding the submissions as they have been coming in. The timing is tight but we are on track to deliver the report and advice.’’

Staff from the council’s monitoring and research team had the tools to manage large quantities of ‘‘open text feedback’’ and no external labour was required for getting through the submissions, they said.

The council would not release any information yet about how submissions were trending ‘‘because this could unfairly influence the outcome’’.

It hoped to release some preliminary findings on Thursday.