Owner fined for razing historic Huntly cottage
A bit of Huntly history dating to the 1880s is gone forever after its owner bulldozed it illegally.
Kevin David Lynch was found guilty and fined $10,000 by the Huntly District Court for failing to file for a resource consent to destroy the late Victorian coalmining cottage with a borrowed digger. The cottage – at 165 Tregoweth Street – was listed as a Category 2 Heritage building by the Waikato District Council in 2004.
Heritage NZ advised it would have have been unlikely to support its demolition if resource consent processes had been followed.
Unoccupied since 2000, the cottage was ‘‘perhaps the most intact and amongst the oldest surviving miner’s cottages in the Waikato District’’, District Court and Environmental Judge Melanie Harland said in her ruling.
Lynch was aware of the heritage listing and pleaded guilty, stating the property, built between 1883 and 1889, had been beyond repair and a safety risk. It had also been broken into and its interior vandalised a number of times. The defendant’s decision to demolish the cottage in January 2016 was described as a ‘‘spur of the moment one’’, the court documents show.
The maximum penalty for such an offence is $300,000 or two years in prison.
Judge Harland stated that the offending was deliberate but she took into account Lynch’s safety concerns and his early guilty plea.
‘‘I accept that the cottage was in a state of considerable disrepair prior to it being demolished, but I consider this to be somewhat of a two-edged sword for the defendant,’’ Harland said.
‘‘The letter from Heritage NZ indicates this cottage was relatively unique within the Waikato context . . . but I also accept that there is a real tension in cases such as this between public and private interests if a private landowner to or cannot afford to spend money on restoring a heritage building.
‘‘The effect of the demolition is that the heritage values associated with the building have been lost forever,’’ she said.