Superior Firewood and its smaller neighbour, Woodstock Firewood, have been given until the end of September to quit their sites on the Shotover River Delta, along with the Ironwood Recycled Timbers yard.
Landowner the Queenstown Lakes District Council served papers on the three businesses 11 days ago, to make room for a planned 90m runway end safety area at Queenstown Airport.
The safety area, extending into the delta from the eastern end of Queenstown Airport's main runway, was needed to meet new Civil Aviation Authority safety requirements.
Superior Firewood manager Albert de Koning said he was already scouting Queenstown to find new premises for the firewood business, but feared a shortage of suitable industrial land would force him to relocate to Cromwell or Kingston.
With the cost of petrol already sky-high and rising, customers would have to pay more for deliveries of wood trucked in, he warned.
Worse still, if a suitable site could not be found, the jobs of 10 full-time employees were at risk.
"You can imagine they are concerned. Some of those people have been with us for years," he said.
"At this moment, we don't like to consider that."
Lakes Property Services manager Jo Conroy said the owner of Woodstock Firewood was "effectively a squatter" after refusing to sign a new month-by-month licence agreement offered to all three businesses last year.
All three were expected to be out by the end of September. Woodstock would be served with a trespass notice, and the police called in, if the operation continued past that date, she warned.
Woodstock manager Shane McManus declined to discuss the wrangle over the land yesterday, but said eviction would also force his business out of Queenstown.
"We would have to move out of town," he said.
"At the end of the day, the firewood yards will be closed down in Queenstown and it's going to have to be trucked in.
"It's the community that's going to get hit by it. They will get firewood in but, guaranteed, the price is going to climb."
Queenstown Lakes Mayor Clive Geddes said the decision to evict the businesses, while prompted by the airport safety area work, was also part of a wider look at competing uses of the Shotover River Delta area.
Those included existing commercial gravel extraction, firewood, timber yard and recycling operations, plus council plans for wastewater treatment facilities, Otago Regional Council plans for flood protection work, airport plans for the safety area, and Transit New Zealand plans for a future road corridor through the area.
The land occupied by Superior Firewood was in a rural general zone, with a designation for wastewater treatment and airport protection in addition, Mr Geddes said.
The business had been allowed to develop "by default" until the land was purchased under the Public Works Act by the council in 2004.
Businesses had been "put on notice" their time was limited when they were moved to monthly licence agreements last year, Mr Geddes said.
While accepting the airport's needs were a priority, Mr De Koning said he worried for the resort's future energy supplies at a time when there was demand for more environmentally friendly heating methods.
Superior Firewood's 2ha yard was the largest supplier of firewood to the resort, with up to 10,000cu m of pine, larch, willow and oregon - sourced mainly from Wakatipu development sites - going to homes, bars, restaurants and hotels each year, he said.
"Where are these people all of a sudden going to get their wood from? There's going to be a major outcry."
Trucking loads of wood in from distant centres - as other suppliers to the resort already did - seemed "a bit crazy", he said.
"I don't know how they do it and make money."
Last year's Queenstown property market update by MAC Property had predicted an acute shortage of industrial land in Queenstown would force industrial development to Alexandra and Cromwell.
Mr Geddes accepted "absolutely" there was a shortage of industrial land, but said the Frankton Flats plan change being developed would provide for more yard-based industrial activities on the airport's boundary.
The plan change - for one of the most important strategic sites in the Queenstown Lakes district - allowed for the zoning of 30ha of light and heavy industrial land, and 30ha of residential, commercial and retail land at Frankton.
