Growing pains:
Civic Centre seeking expansion
The backers of one of Manawatū’s busiest venues are eager to raise the bar, but first they must build one - an ambition tangled in red tape.
The Feilding Civic Centre Trust wants the building’s heritage status to be relaxed so its footprint can be extended, allowing for a bar that would generate new income to counter diminishing grants funding.
The venue, built in the mid-1950s and comprising a sports stadium and a 430-seat concert chamber, is enjoying strong patronage with 32,000 people through its doors in the past six months - equal to its total for the 2022 financial year.
It has received extensive sound and lighting upgrades and will this month host one of New Zealand’s biggest acts, Six60 selecting the venue for their Grass Roots Tour.
But when the trestles are set up to provide a make-shift bar for the April 27 gig, it will be evident the locale remains a step behind what today’s patrons expect, says trust chairman Tony Chapman.
“They expect to have competent people serving them from behind a bar, not a trestle in the middle of the room.
“But we can’t expand and we’re full. There’s no more room in this building, we’ve taken every inch of it up.”
A sold-out dinner function in early March, celebrating the town’s 150th anniversary, struggled to cater to the demand of 230 guests with its trestle bar in the foyer; facilities Chapman called “seriously inadequate”.
The Feilding Civic Centre was a category B-listed heritage building, registered by its owner, Manawatū District Council, and deemed significant for social and architectural heritage values.
The B stood for “buggered”, Chapman said, when it came to the trust hitting paydirt on the hard work and improvements they had put into the venue over the past 20 years.
“We didn’t do all that work to have people be disappointed.”
Chapman cut a frustrated figure when presenting his six-monthly report to the council on March 21, lamenting a lack of progress on a number of issues and a lack of cohesion between the trust and the council on their visions for the venue.
“I’ve been told by people sitting around this table it would cost thousands [to remove heritage status]. That’s an OK answer, but it’s not good enough for me, I’m afraid. I want to know how many thousand, why it costs so much, why is it so difficult?”
Both the trust and Carla Bennett, who had managed the civic centre for eight years, wanted to extend the building onto the grass area outside its Church St entrance, where new toilets could be located, allowing space near the foyer for a bar and office.
Chapman told the Manawatū Standard the $1.4 million invested in the civic centre by the council had been matched by the trust through grants and operational income.
But he warned those grants would not keep coming, and it was getting harder and harder to attract bigger acts without a bar.
“It’s a deterrent rather than an attraction. And if the grants are decreasing, which we totally believe they will, if we had a nice area out there we could use it for small weddings as a way to generate additional income, so the council’s not required to put more ratepayers’ money in to keep this building going.”
Manawatū district mayor Helen Worboys said she thought a bar at the civic centre was a great idea, but acknowledged the resource consent process wasn’t a simple one and couldn’t progress fast enough for Chapman.
She hoped the Government’s plans to make the Resource Management Act more user-friendly may help “unlock” such a proposal.
A draft “statement for intent” was being worked on between the council and the trust to ensure their objectives going forward were the same.
“That document will guide both council and the trust on what we want to do.”
The 600 tickets for the Six60 show sold out within minutes of going on sale. It would be the first significant concert at the civic centre since Dave Dobbyn in 2020.
Chapman believed it would be possible to extend the building and retain the facade of the entrance, if required to. He said it wasn’t even the original facade.