Lorraine Cooper - on the sale of Commonage Land and the sewage crisis.
And yet QLDC and the Mountain Scene remain silent.
We thought it was important to share these words written by Lorraine Cooper, wife of former Queenstown mayor and Minister of Tourism Warren Cooper. She wrote this article as an opinion piece that appeared in this week’s Mountain Scene and it is reproduced here with Lorraine’s permission. We felt it was particularly ironic that the Mountain Scene has not written one word about the current sewage crisis or covered the Lakeview fiasco.
“In December 1971, Parliament p a s s e d The Q u e e n s t o w n R e s e r v e s Vesting and Empowering Bill.
It was promoted by the-then Queenstown Borough Council to overcome the most pressing problem facing the district — the replacement of an in- adequate sewerage scheme to cope with the increasing local and tourist population.
B e c a u s e o f this o v e r l o a d on the sewerage system, the borough council was forced to withhold building permits for hotels and motels within the district until some acceptable solution could be reached so that this important development could proceed.
After this Empowering Bill was passed by Parliament, 100 acres of land on Queenstown Hill were given to the borough and with it, the power to subdivide for dwellings, allowing Queenstown to continue to develop its potential and live up to its reputation as New Zealand's leading tourist resort.
The last of these Commonage blocks has just been sold for $33 million.
Now, over 50 years on, history is repeating itself.
The deputy mayor of the Queens- town Lakes District Council (QLDC) is recommending all development stops until the problems facing the district can be rectified.
The sewerage scheme is no longer fit for purpose and, reading between the lines, there doesn't seem to be a quick fix for the troubled treatment plant.
QLDC residents' approval ratings have been declining since the increase of visitors post lockdown.
People are getting fed up with the traffic congestion, lack of parking in the CBD, the broken yellow lines that disallow parking everywhere, the amount of time the Alliance is taking to finish the infrastructure downtown, as well as the increased cost to the rate-payers, the disruption to retailers and restaurants in the line of fire, the disastrous Lakeview deal that won't reap any benefit to us until the Aussie developers start selling their proposed Lakeview A p a r t m e n t s , a n d o t h e r critical needs that make the day-to-day lives of its residents frustrating, to say the least.
Time is of the essence, and if QLDC continues to give the go-ahead to more developments, the situation will only get worse.
It seems the council is determined to create more growth when the region is struggling to cope with the growth it is a l r e a d y e x p e r i e n c i n g .
We could end up killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
So let's hope the government can pull something out of the hat in response to the wish-list delivered to them by the three councils in a similar fashion to the way they did 54 years.”