Queenstown Lakes District Council corporate and regulatory services general manager Roger Taylor told the Otago Daily Times yesterday he had seen the "first draft" of the report, prepared by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
"There are some questions that I have that I have asked them to clarify in the report [and] validate some of the data that they used in the numbers for the report.
"I expect that the next draft will be available next week that will go to the council towards the end of next week. After that we would hope to finalise it and make it available as part of the consultation process in about 10 days."
The report will examine the controversial alliance between the two airports, publicly announced in July, which had Queenstown Airport Corporation create and sell a 24.99% new shareholding to Auckland International Airport for $27.7 million.
Auckland has until June 30 to increase its shareholding to between 30% and 35%.
The matter was taken to the High Court by Air New Zealand and the Queenstown Community Strategic Asset Group in August, which lodged separate, but related, proceedings, seeking an injunction to stop any further shares being issued, and a judicial review of the process taken by the parties.
Two key documents relating to the alliance were sealed by the High Court, ahead of a hearing on the matter, set down for May.
While the council had given the High Court an assurance it would not make any further decisions until the court had made its finding, that did not preclude the council from holding community consultation over the issue.
Three PricewaterhouseCoopers' staff had been given access to all documents, including those which had been sealed. They assimilated the information and were providing analysis for the community.
The council was yet to decide the best way to disseminate the information and "the degree to which we need to cover the district with that".
"One approach we are considering is using community association meetings as a potential forum."
The council was keen to make sure all of the communities within the district were involved in the process, he said.
The first stage of public consultation would not be about the second tranche of the share sale, instead it would seek the community's views on the shareholding creation and sale issue to date.
The information gathered from initial consultation would help the council determine its next steps in the decision-making process, likely to include determining the problems, objectives and options to address them; deciding what further analysis if any should be done concerning those options; deciding what its preferred options were; and deciding what further steps would be required to make final decisions, including considering the nature of further consultation.
Mr Taylor said there had been no request to date for the council to consider the second tranche of shareholding.
