Council red tape — and costs it incurs — has forced organisers of Arrowtown’s Matariki celebrations to hand the event back to the Arrowtown Preschool.
A long-standing fundraiser for the preschool, the Arrowtown Promotion and Business Association’s (APBA) Arrowtown Charitable Trust took over running the event in 2022, in part because it became too large for the preschool volunteers to manage, particularly given governance, health and safety regulations and liquor licensing challenges.
Initially a three-day event, coinciding with the Matariki public holiday, it was knocked back to one day in 2023.
Last year, a separate committee, within the charitable trust, was formed to organise it.
APBA manager Nicky Busst said after last year it was offered back to the preschool.
"Basically, the Arrowtown Charitable Trust said, ‘we can’t afford to put this on any more ... unless we start charging $40 per head’, which is not what a community event’s supposed to be."
Ms Busst noted last year’s event cost $79,000 to put on — a 33% increase on the year before.
That was largely due to additional council requirements, such as fencing, extra toilets, tracking waste and carbon mileage, first aid and security, she said.
"It’s not necessarily a council invoice, but directed by council," she said.
"We needed 70 volunteers on that day due to requirements down to, ‘because people might climb up that wall in Buckingham Green, you need to have people on the clock around there ... they could fall off’; ‘they’re going to get too close in to the firepit with their marshmallows — you’ve got to have people managing the firepit’.
Preschool head teacher Jane Foster said while it was "a bit sad" to lose the popular event from Arrowtown’s main street, it was being brought back to its community grassroots.
It would be held on the Arrowtown School grounds — to circumvent council bureaucracy — and be on a "much smaller scale".
"I think it’s just all this liability that everybody’s scared of now — you can sort of understand where council are coming from, because it’ll probably fall on them, but it’s just putting it out of reach to hold these events."
Ms Busst and Queenstown Business Chamber of Commerce chief executive Sharon Fifield have also taken a swipe at the council’s draft events policy, which they label "reactive" and "uninspiring".
The Queenstown Lakes District Council set
out eight objectives, to be applied across all event-related processes, including funding criteria, and four "high-level principles" — it will come back to full council for consideration.
Ms Busst called it a "reactive" policy without a strategy.
"It’s very much, ‘events are going to come to Queenstown anyway’ ... rather than, ‘we really want you to come to Queenstown’."
The Queenstown Business Chamber of Commerce’s submission on the draft policy said the organisation was receiving feedback from event organisers saying it was "too hard" and "costly" to meet expectations on adherence to multiple policies and reporting of such.
Ms Fifield said there was a "recurring theme that it’s all just too hard to run events in this district, and that’s a real shame".
"It just feels like events are having to jump through too many hoops now, and tick way too many boxes, that it’s just not worth it.
"I just feel like council need to flip the script a bit, and think of all the reasons why it might be a good idea to have an event, rather than all the reasons why we can’t."
