Just three weeks after the High Court threw out a challenge against consent for a new Catholic school on Speargrass Flat Rd, near Arrowtown, three remaining parties want to take the case to the Court of Appeal.
Ayrburn Farm Estates Ltd, consulting engineer James Hadley and Rebecca Lucas, as trustees of the Millhouse Trust, plus barrister Jane Taylor and former Queenstown Airport Corporation chairman Mark Taylor, via Wellington counsel James Gardner-Hopkins, lodged an interlocutory application for leave to appeal to the Court of Appeal at the Invercargill registry of the High Court on Thursday.
The application submitted 20 points as grounds for the appeal, including the claim the High Court "erred by not sending the decision back to the Environment Court for determination after finding the Environment Court erred in its approach".
The application said the Environment Court confined its assessment of the school proposal against "only the eight assessment matters listed in the district plan" and erred by not assessing the proposal against all matters which came from the alleged site standard breach.
"There is a very real prospect that the Environment Court excluded evidence that it would have had regard to, had it not made the assessment error," the application said.
"Development in the rural residential zone of the Queenstown Lakes District Council, and the resolution of the question is of importance to residents as well as potential developers in that zone ... It is of public importance that the Environment Court is required to determine the application again".
Queenstown lawyer Russell Ibbotson, counsel for the Roman Catholic Bishop of the Diocese of Dunedin, the resource consent applicant, said the application would be opposed, when asked yesterday.
Lawyer Tony Ray, of Wanaka, said yesterday the council as respondent had yet to make a decision on which stance it would take.
Justice Christine French said in her High Court dismissal released last month that while the appellants persuaded her the Environment Court decision contained two of the five submitted errors of law, she was not persuaded the errors were material.
The proposed $3 million to $5 million second campus on 2.6ha of rural residential zoned land at 478 Speargrass Flat Rd was planned by the Dunedin based Catholic Education Office to be administered by St Joseph's School, Queenstown.
The staged development was intended to teach up to 112 primary school-aged pupils from Queenstown, Arrowtown, Lake Hayes and the outer Wakatipu.
