Freedom camping monitoring to be looked at

The Southland District Council says more data on the number of freedom campers in Southland is needed to accurately monitor how the activity is growing and where people are staying.

Discussing freedom camping in ‘‘hot spots’’ in the district, including Lumsden, Waikawa and Te Anau, committee members resolved for more data to be gathered by staff to paint a more consistent picture of how regularly people were using particular sites and how many people at a time were at any given site.

Councillor Brian Dillon suggested this could be a task asked of residents in their communities.

People would pass the freedom camping areas on their way to work and they could stop to count the number of freedom campers and report the numbers back to council, he said.

Environment services group manager Bruce Halligan agreed visual monitoring, such as counting how many freedom camping vehicles could be seen, could be beneficial, but warranting mem- bers of the community to have physical contact, like asking noncomplying campers to move to a designated area, was more high risk.

‘‘We can’t manage what we don’t know about but we are monitoring [freedom camping],’’ he said.

There was also discussion on how well all the freedom camping sites were used throughout the district and what level of facilities were available in those sites.

The council may need consider how many freedom camping sites it has in terms of giving campers the best with what resources the council has, Halligan said. ‘‘We might need to have a longer-term look at the locations,’’ he said. ‘‘That could result in fewer, [but] better sites.’’

The committee also discussed complaints and infringements related to freedom camping, of which there had not been many.

Environmental health manager Michael Sarfaiti said only about three or four infringements had been given out to campers during the summer season.

The council preferred to move people on rather than fine them, he said.