A progress report on the Wanaka Sports Facility will be received by the Wanaka Community Board this week to help inform consultation on the facility through the 10-Year Plan process, now underway, Queenstown Lakes District Council project manager Ken Gousmett said.

The progress report, which would be made available to the Wanaka community via the Council website or as hard copies from the Council’s service centre on Ardmore Street, contained  information including; the site, the facilities mix, the concept design, landscaping, cost (including operating cost and rate impact) and staging.

“Funding for the facility is contained in the 10-Year Plan and a lot has now been achieved in terms of working towards construction of stage one (indoor sports facility and hard court area) being completed by 2014/15.

The following work has been successfully completed to date:

• Signing of agreements with two land owners at the new Three Parks site
securing 5.5ha of land for the proposed sports centre. Transfer of the land to
Council is subject to the timing of provision of roading and services by the
land owners and a minimum period from signing of the agreements.

• Two rounds of comprehensive user group and community consultation
focusing on sport and recreation needs, resulting in the completion of the
Facilities Mix report.

• Completion of the Landscape Report for the whole of the site, including
concept designs.

• Completion of a budget capital cost estimate, depreciation, sources of
funding, revenue, operation cost and impact of rates.

• Preparation work for the Notice of Requirement application to secure a
designation over the site. This is expected to be a notified application which
will allow for further public participation.

• The preparation of a contour plan for the whole site and review of existing
geotechnical reports for the Three Parks area.

“By June 2012 the Notice for Requirement application will have been lodged and
processing will be underway and Council will have adopted the 10-Year Plan,” Mr Gousmett said.

This would allow design work to commence on Stage 1 and architectural and
structural designers to be engaged. “Once we have this work completed and costings done the Council will take the results back to user groups and the wider community,” he said.

Further work would also be done on the suggested ‘Centre of Excellence’ concept which would primarily be used by High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) to base its snow sports and medium altitude training programmes.

Mr Gousmett said progress on the project had been excellent and acknowledged the hard work of the Sports Facility Steering Group chaired by Duncan Good of Wanaka.

ENDS
For further information please contact Ken Gousmett 03 441 0499.

>> Wanaka Sports Facility Progress Report and Business Case April 2012 (pdf 2.3MB)

By: Andrea Bunting