At a full meeting on Thursday, Queenstown Lakes councillors decided to ban stallholders from operating on the waterfront for 12 months, and to stop issuing more permits for the activity.
However, existing permit holders, who are mostly food sellers, will be able to keep operating there until their permits expire — the last few will expire next March.
The decision, which followed an amendment by Mayor Glyn Lewers, softened a recommendation in a staff report to ban stalls from the entirety of the resort’s town centre indefinitely.
The report said the majority of stallholders had been breaching the council’s bylaw for overseeing the activity by staying too long in one location and operating too close to each other.
However, councillors agreed to allow them to operate in Beach St and Queenstown Mall if they wished until their permits expired.
Those stallholders whose permits expire in the next few months can keep operating until August 31.
Hot dog stand owner Nicholas Cantaro said he was relieved he had been given a chance to find alternative locations to operate from.
However, councillors had simply "kicked the ball down the road" for a few months when most had agreed the bylaw was "unworkable" and needed replacing as soon as possible.
Although he thought a pragmatic solution could be found, council staff had got stuck in bureaucratic process and seemed to have given up, Mr Cantaro said.
In her report, council monitoring, enforcement and environmental manager Isabelle Logez said stallholders continued to breach the bylaw despite education and low-level enforcement action.
The bylaw provided for three or four permitted buskers or "pop-up stallholders" to operate along the 150-metre strip beside the Queenstown Bay lake wall.
They had to move every hour, and remain at least 50 metres from each other.
After the 2023 bylaw was adopted, complaints from members of the public prompted staff to monitor the area, which showed breaches of the duration of stay and separation requirements.
Twenty formal warnings were issued to 15 stallholders between July and September last year.
About half of them were still operating and breaching the bylaw, while new stallholders were operating unlawfully, Ms Logez said.
The recovery in visitor numbers in Queenstown since Covid-19 had prompted an increase in the number of stallholder permits from 52 in 2022 to 133 last year.
The one-year permits were obtained through an online registration system, with no limit on the number issued.
Her team was "reluctant to exhaust further resource to escalate enforcement action", and recommended councillors vote to ban the stallholders from the town centre completely.
The bylaw was not up for review until 2028, and although councillors could bring that forward, it usually took two years to develop a new bylaw, she said.
Cr Gavin Bartlett said the bylaw was not working, and the issue was clearly a "problem of the council’s own making".
Cr Niki Gladding said it had become "unworkable" because of the number of permits issued, and suggested staff be directed to start work on a new bylaw.
In the meantime, the council should stop issuing new permits so stallholders had a chance to comply with the existing rules, Cr Gladding said.
Speaking at the meeting’s public forum, stallholder Monica Banhidi said the stalls brought "life and vibrancy" to the waterfront at a time when the town centre was "rapidly becoming vertically integrated international chain stores".
Another stallholder, Oliver Nutt, said he had "yet to speak to anyone who thinks having vendors at the waterfront is a bad thing".
