A Queenstown company is likely to pay a premium for a strip of rock face on Queenstown Hill, having encroached on to council land with their building.
At a full council meeting today, Queenstown Lakes district councillors will discuss selling a 118sq m strip of the Queenstown Hill reserve to the company.
In 2004, High Peaks Ltd had a commercial building, The Red Barn, built in the Gorge Rd industrial zone - then discovered part of the building had been built on reserve land.
Car parks and a gabion retaining wall encroach on the reserve land and, having failed to reach an agreement to fix the problem with the contractor, High Peaks offered to buy the land from the council.
When the property subcommittee looked at the proposal last December, it decided High Peaks would have to pay the market value for the land and also "a premium of 50% of the land".
Referred to in Lakes Property Services property manager Jo Conroy's report as "a sheer rock face in an industrial/commercial zoned area with not a lot of potential for public use", the land has a market value of $49,000.
Ms Conroy said while "the mistake may be genuine, occupation of a public reserve comes with a price".
She is recommending the district council sell the strip of land for $73,500 plus costs and GST.
"Surveying is not as precise an art as perhaps it ought to be [so encroachment] is reasonably regular," Ms Conroy said.
With the issue of building on council reserve land, she said the problem was often historic as nobody realised until the council began surveying land to improve it or build new facilities.
In a residential setting, it was also reasonably common in areas where there were no boundary pegs or fences.
"People might put a clothesline up or a kid's trampoline which is not on an area that belongs to them," she said.
However, most encroachments were accidents.
"People don't do this on purpose [as] it is quite painful to resolve," she said.
In the case of The Red Barn, she gave High Peaks Ltd credit for making the council aware of the problem.
