Easement appears to be solution

Neil Jorgensen

An easement through a neighbouring reserve could be the solution to the final legal hurdle for the Waitaki Resource Recovery Park’s long-awaited redevelopment

This week the Waitaki District Council’s community services committee recommended the council agrees, subject to notification and the consideration  of submissions, to the granting of an easement through a portion of Oamaru’s Fenwick Park to allow up to 10 commercial vehicles to access the redeveloped resource recovery park via a different route from domestic traffic.

While the bulk of Fenwick Park is across Chelmer St from the recovery park’s current site, the adjacent section, occupied by the council-owned dog pound, was also "labelled reserve", council assets manager Neil Jorgensen said.

"It’s hardly even a hurdle really," Mr Jorgensen said.

"If we want to get that little bit of land, we need to go through this process."He said the council was "not anticipating any major issues" with the resource recovery park trust’s application and the planned $285,000 redevelopment — which the council has funded — should be able to go ahead.

"It’s going to be an awesome area where people can recycle and minimise their residual waste."

In September last year, the council balked at funding the redevelopment until the trust had done work to avoid, remedy or mitigate the concerns of neighbours — primarily the owners of the Oamaru Top 10 Holiday Park, across the street —  about the negative effect the sound of breaking glass had on their residential amenity value.

In January, the trust’s acoustic testing showed 25mm-thick rubber lining installed in the glass collection bins on site had cut the noise of glass breaking at the park roughly in half.

Trust manager Dave Clare said while the redevelopment was intended to improve traffic congestion and improve safety for the park’s users, a byproduct of the new layout planned for the recovery park would be another significant reduction in noise for the recovery park’s neighbours.

The glass collection area would be moved into a semi-enclosed area and the glass containers would be moved to the back of the site — moving the operation which caused the most noise at the recovery park about 200m further away from the holiday park.

He said the planned changes would cut noise levels by another 50%. In the 2016-17 financial year, 83,000 domestic users drove through the recovery park, an increase from 75,000 the year before.

"We are getting substantially more domestic coming through and currently the domestic and  commercial share the same entrance and sometimes the commercial needs to come in through the exit and drive contra-flow to get to where it needs to get through — it is getting increasingly a health and safety hazard.

"It should be a noticeable improvement on all aspects."

If all went to plan, earthworks could begin in November and the trust planned to keep the recovery park open seven days a week through construction.

The owners of Oamaru Top 10 Holiday Park were not available for comment yesterday afternoon.

hamish.maclean@odt.co.nz