Advance Terrace resident Derek Brown said he and his wife, Anna, are $20,000 poorer for the experience, but hearing Queenstown’s council acknowledge the boardwalk, which connected the Arrowfields subdivision with their street, was unconsented, was a good but personally expensive result.
Work to dismantle the boardwalk, which pressed against their boundary, started about three weeks ago.
Mr Brown said the process not only cost him a lot of money, but revealed the arrogance of council, which has now back-tracked on a previous statement that said the boardwalk was consented and has shifted the blame on to the developer.
"Even though the rules are black and white, council just do what they want," Mr Brown said.
"Basically, they just think ‘we’re going wear them down ... it’s going to cost them too much money, and we’ll win’."
In August, 2017, developer Arrowsouth was given consent for the Arrowfields subdivision on the northeast side of McDonnell Road, which required a public walkway up to Advance Tce.
Mr Brown said the original design for the track - a gravel pathway culminating in a short set of steps beside his property - was put in for consent, notified and "everyone was happy with that".
However, in 2019, Mr Brown and several neighbours were appalled to discover a wooden boardwalk over three metres high was being built over the track’s final stretch.
"Basically, anyone walking on that would be looking straight into all our bedrooms," Mr Brown said.
"Nobody here knew that [the design] had been changed."
In 2019, former council spokesman Jack Barlow said the minor change was due to "structural construction requirements", and it hadn’t been notified because no changes to the height, scale and scope of the structure meant it fell within the bounds of it’s resource consent.
But Mr Brown, teaming up with two neighbours, disputed that claim, and alleged the structure also breached setback requirements.
He said they approached council for answers, but "they just didn’t want to talk to us".
"So they built it and they just kept fobbing us off."
The trio of residents engaged Queenstown lawyer Graeme Todd and, despite Mr Brown’s neighbours eventually bowing out, he went on to hire a planner to report on the structure’s non-compliance with the district plan.
It wasn’t until Mr Brown delivered the reports to council and announced he was taking them to Environment Court, that council "back-tracked".
A non-notified consent to change "an approved trail design" was granted last year, which meant the boardwalk had to be pulled down, and replaced with a gravel track.
Mr Brown says he and his wife were lucky they could afford to take council on, but acknowledged a lot of people facing similar issues "just have to grin and bear it".
"Why can’t council pay us that back ... it wasn’t even a mistake - they meant to do it and refused point-blank to even talk about it with us."
Despite council’s previous assertion the "minor change" was within the bounds of the original resource consent for the track, a council spokeswoman now states the boardwalk was unconsented - but that it was not a council mistake.
