Treble Cone's $20 million gondola is a step closer to being built after the Queenstown Lakes District Council's top Wanaka planning consultant recommended the revised proposal be granted resource consent.
The skifield's parent company, Snowline Holdings Ltd, wants to build a 3.04km-long gondola system, capable of transporting up to 2000 people an hour, up the 909m vertical rise from the Matukituki Valley floor to the Treble Cone main building.
Snowline lodged an amended resource consent application in August in which the size, number, and location of the gondola base station buildings had been cut back and the route of the 20-tower Dopplemayr cableway system had been altered.
A report from Lakes Environmental Wanaka planning team leader Christian Martin - ahead of a resource consent hearing set down for next week - recommends approving the revised application to construct and operate the gondola.
Mr Martin said the changes to Snowline's original application - first lodged in July 2006 - "significantly reduce the nature and scale of activity located on the [Matukituki] valley floor".
A memorandum issued by independent commissioners David Collins and Gillian Macleod in December 2006 cited concerns about the original application's "cluster" of large base buildings and cableway route across the Matukituki Valley floor and road.
The commissioners said they preferred something minimal at the base buildings, which would lessen the visual impact and adverse environmental effects of a gondola on the area's outstanding natural landscape.
"The applicant has appropriately adopted the recommendation of the commission to restrict buildings to only those reasonably necessary to operate the gondola as a means of transport," Mr Martin's report said.
However, despite the amendments significantly reducing the extent of adverse landscape character effects, the proposal was still considered to go beyond what the surrounding landscape could absorb, as defined in the district plan.
However, the gondola proposal's "significant positive effects" tipped the balance, Mr Martin's report said.
"While the proposal conflicts with objectives and policies seeking to protect the surrounding outstanding national landscape . . . the extent to which the [gondola] promotes objectives and policies concerning transport, economics and the enhanced utilisation of existing skifields is sufficiently significant."
His report concluded that the positive effects outweighed the minor adverse effects on the character of the landscape.
A resource consent hearing has been set down for 9am on Wednesday, October 22, at Edgewater Resort in Wanaka.
