Cherry blossom festival shrinks
The Waikato Cherry Tree Festival has failed to get resource consent and will have to be trimmed back.
Organisers Paul Oulton and Anne Cao are holding the festival on their country property near Tamahere, starting September 20.
Although the festival will be allowed to occur, it will take place under observation from Waikato District Council staff, after the organisation was denied resource consent.
The event will also drastically reduce in size from its original 12,000 people over 10 days. Instead event organisers have had to chop out two full days from the schedule and reduce numbers after they failed to get the required information in on time for council to process it.
Changes were made to the application as recently as September 13.
‘‘How do I feel about it? Obviously not happy,’’ Oulton told
‘‘Basically, the only issues that were remaining on the resource consent were traffic management issues.’’
He thought they had provided the information on time, which would have allowed optimum safety regulations to be put in place for traffic flows relating to the event.
Nonetheless, the information was submitted at the last minute, meaning council didn’t receive it until after the deadline, according to Oulton.
‘‘I mean, they didn’t have to cut it off at a certain time,’’ Oulton said.
‘‘They could have finished off the traffic management plan basically, and that was it.’’
He said the festival would still be able to go ahead, but a couple of days – September 23 and 26 – would need to be dropped.
Under council regulations, the number of people attending the event will have to be significantly curtailed as well.
A lot of ticket sales are also being refunded. Oulton said he wasn’t dealing with that, so didn’t want to give numbers.
Cao said the Cherry Tree Festival was intended to contribute to the wider Waikato region, and was not intended to make much money in itself.
She said many neighbours had supported the event. But others hadn’t, including Daniel Wood. He was pleased to hear the event would be regulated by council.
‘‘To be honest, council have done their process and they’ve been more than fair with the applicants,’’ Wood said.
‘‘They’ve given them a lot of time, and this resource consent denial comes down to the applicants themselves, that they didn’t provide all of the information that they were required to supply to council.’’
However, Wood alleges that people are already trespassing on properties neighbouring the Cherry Tree Festival, trying to get photos.
That’s something that happened around the festival the last two years which residents were concerned about.
Council will have staff on site counting attendees and cars, to make sure the organisers are complying.
Waikato district mayor Allan Sanson said it’s really important for any event organisers to put their applications in early.
That would allow council staff to receive all the right information and have time to process it.
‘‘Council has to follow the rules and the rules are there to protect our communities,’’ he said.