Silverstream land issue spurs them on
‘‘This is not a swap, it is in fact a land scam’’
Election fever, in crowd numbers anyway, came to Silverstream on Monday evening.
More than 300 people crammed into the local school hall for a meeting organised by the Save Our Hills group in opposition to the Upper Hutt City Council’’s proposed swapping of 30 hectares of forest land at the entrance to the city known as the Silverstream Spur.
In March the council detailed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Guildford Timber Company which owns 300 hectares of forest land along and behind the Pinehaven hills and, in part, adjacent to the Spur.
Any swap would see the spur land exchanged for 130 hectares of Guildford land above Pinehaven. This non-binding agreement is included in a long-term Land Use Strategy to be adopted in a final meeting of the city council.this afternoon.
Ownership of the spur would allow for a suitable road from Silverstream to the ridgetop land where an estimated 1000 houses are identified in a development which could take up to 30 years to complete.
Though advertised as a ‘‘Mayoral Candidates Debate’’ the meeting had a format where the candidates - Wayne Guppy and Alan Jefferies - answered 10 questions, in turn, on the land issue from the Save Our Hills organiser Steve Pattinson.
In introduction, Pattinson said the council’s land-use strategy was full of errors and contradictions and should not be adopted by the current council at its final meeting.
‘‘There will be no land swap until a plan change has occurred. I want to make that very clear’’ Guppy said in opening. ‘‘There’s an RMA process the council will have to go through if this proceeds.’’
But the strategy needed to be adopted by the council that had done the work and put it in place, he said. A new council could make changes in the future.
‘‘This is not a swap, it is in fact a land scam,’’ Jefferies said. ‘‘There is such a substantial difference between the value of the land at Silverstream Spur and what I refer to as all the waste land that the council is proposing to take over from the Guildford Timber Company.’’
Guppy said the council was acting in good faith.
‘‘If the plan change takes place . . .we are actually protecting the face of Silverstream and Pinehaven because by doing that we will have some control over the [housing] density and what might happen.’’