If all went to plan, work on the foundations for the proposed Queenstown convention centre could begin at the start of 2015, Queenstown Lakes District Council chief executive Adam Feeley said yesterday.
This date assumes public consultation is positive and straightforward and Queenstown Lakes District councillors approve the centre.
However, a more immediate issue is whether councillors will make a decision after consultation has finished or will leave the decision for the new council, after the local government election.
Mr Feeley said councillors had ''not really expressed a view on that'' and regardless of whether significant change of representation was created from the election, councillors would still have ''a fairly clear steer'' from public consultation process.
On Friday, councillors approved the centre going to public consultation and a two-day hearing scheduled for September 3-4.
Voting for the local government election will close on October 12 and new councillors will take their places at the council table during the latter half of October.
A report prepared for the council and made public on Friday suggested different options to fund the ''$39 million shortfall''.
The report assumed the Government would fund $10 million of the $50 million centre. On Friday, the Otago Daily Times asked the office of Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce whether the Government would be putting money into the Queenstown convention centre, to which a spokeswoman for the minister said the Government was not ruling this out.
''But our preferred option is to put in the least amount of capital as we can so as to minimise risks for taxpayers.''
When asked if a report assuming a fifth of the centre's funding would come from a government whose preferred option was to put in the least amount was worrying, Mr Feeley said the information was inconsistent with what the council had received.
He said there had been ''relatively firm indications'' of financial support from the Government and instead of a grant for Queenstown, the support would be ''for New Zealand's tourism strategy as a whole''.
''Queenstown is quite distinct in that regard because it's actually an investment in New Zealand's tourism ... it's not social welfare for Queenstown.''
Mr Joyce's office maintained the statement sent on Friday was correct.
When it was pointed out many high-end hotels in Queenstown already offered conference facilities and the resort was already on the conference map, raising the question whether some hotels with conference facilities could suffer from the construction of a purpose-built facility, Mr Feeley replied ''It's a different market.''
He said many hotels reached capacity at 170 people and the convention centre, which was proposed to cater for up to 750, would serve the larger conferences.
''It's not beyond the realms of possibility that they [conferences] would want to add rooms for breakouts,'' he said. Smaller conference rooms already available in the resort could then be used.
''The Queenstown centre is pitching to a scale of convention which no-one here currently provides.''
