Waimakariri Mayor Dan Gordon gave a commitment the district council would investigate the prospect of seeking partners from the golfing world and community in a bid to buy the course back from Wolfbrook Property Group.
He also repeated the Waimakariri District Council was vehemently opposed to any future redevelopment of the 18-hole championship grade golf course into housing.
The message from the meeting organisers, the Pegasus Residents Group Inc, which was "wait”.
They want to wait until they have had a chance to formally sit down with Wolfbrook management in a couple of weeks, find out their plans and wait for Wolfbrook to lodge either a zoning change application, or an application under the Fast Track legislation.
Pegasus Residents Group Inc president and meeting facilitator Matt James said until then they don’t know what they are fighting or how to face any challenges to the special zoning the Pegasus golf course already has in place.
With almost 1000 people at the meeting, inside and outside of the Pegasus Bay School Hall, Mr Gordon announced the council had met and discussed the option of finding partners to create a consortium to buy back the course.
He said they do not need wholesale development of the golf course site because they know it is central to the Pegasus community.
“We don’t need help to grow the Waimakariri community. There are already many housing schemes in place. If we wanted this sort of development, then we would have changed the District Plan, and we didn’t.”
Gordon discussed setting up a group to fund the purchase of the course, and also set a deadline, because experts had informed him that if nothing was done by the end of July, then the infrastructure of the existing golf course and grounds would be too expensive to repair.
Waimakariri District Council senior staff spoke about the Fast Track process, identifying the process and any pitfalls, plus possible ways to oppose any application.
This was reinforced by Waimakariri MP Matt Doocey, who added his weight to the call against any Fast Tracking of any redevelopment.
Mr Doocey welcomed the council's plans to investigate buying back the facility and offered to help send a clear message to ministers that Fast Tracking wasn’t an option for Pegasus.
But he reiterated Mr James' message that at the moment they were “shadow boxing with Wolfbrook” and they must wait until Wolfbrook makes its move.
