The long-awaited Hawea River kayak park could be ready by Christmas, after the Otago Regional Council last week approved resource consent variations to enable construction this spring.
To build the park - next to the Camp Hill Bridge at Hawea Flat - the river flow needs to be reduced to about 3cumecs, which Contact Energy previously had consent to do only during autumn.
Work was scheduled to start in March but Contact put the project on hold because electricity demand meant river flows could not be reduced for the time required to build the course.
However, the consent variations permitted lower water levels during spring, so it was now just a matter of arranging a construction start date with contractor Fulton Hogan, Contact generation manager Graham Quinn said.
Work would probably start in late September or early October and it would take about eight weeks to build the park's two features.
