A lakeside Queenstown street plagued by poor behaviour by freedom campers over the past six months will soon have a ban on overnight parking.
The Queenstown Lakes District Council’s infrastructure committee agreed unanimously yesterday to ban parking on both sides of Park St, as well as the lake side of Lake Esplanade, between 10pm and 6am.
The clampdown was welcomed by Park St resident Rob Greig, who said the changes were a "strong, positive move".
"It’ll clean up the issue we’ve had here for the last year or so."
Mr Greig said residents were sick of budget travellers "using the place like a latrine".
"People pay good money and good rates to live down by the lake edge for a reason, and a camper then gets that for nothing?"
A report for the committee included some of the dozens of complaints the council had received about both the streets since December.
They included overnight campers going to the toilet in the bushes, bathing in the lake with soap and leaving used toilet paper and other rubbish strewn about.
One said Park St resembled a "gypsy camp", with cooking, late-night music and other noise.
The report’s author, community partnerships manager Marie Day, said some vehicles were parking in Park St and Lake Esplanade for weeks at a time, avoiding the seven-day limit by moving to a different spot.
Its monitoring in Park St had shown an increase in overnight parking from up to 20 vehicles a night last December to a peak of 96 on April 27.
Although the restrictions could have "unintended consequences", such as the displacement of some legitimate late-night parking by hospitality workers, she was confident the community supported the changes.
Committee chairman Gavin Bartlett said community feedback had made it clear overnight parking in Park St had "got out of hand", while Cr Craig Ferguson said it had given Park St "shades of Woodstock", which was "totally unacceptable".
Cr Quentin Smith said councillors had received a "massive amount of correspondence" on the issue, and "firm action" was needed.
The quashing of the district’s freedom camping bylaw by the High Court last year has limited the ability of council enforcement officers to deal with freedom camping over the summer season.
The council is developing a new freedom camping bylaw that it expects to approve by October.
The committee yesterday also approved a blanket ban on parking on a 200m section of the lakeside shoulder of the Glenorchy-Queenstown road, west of the One Mile carpark.
The report said it would improve safety and reduce conflict between vehicles and users of the roadside path.
All the changes will come into effect as soon as new signage is installed.
