Marion van Dijk/Stuff
Nelson City Council’s support for plans to replace the city’s main library (pictured centre) with a new library, also within the riverside precinct, has come under fire from environmentalists. Spokesman, geologist Aaron Stallard, said there was too much uncertainty about the flood risks at the site to “rush ahead” with the proposal. Combined river flood and coastal inundation modelling due to be released by the council, needed to be made public, Stallard said.
Coastal indundation maps released four months ago, identified about 4500 properties as at risk from sea level rise scenarios. Building a library on the site, at the corner of Trafalgar St and Halifax St, next to the CBD, would leave the council with little choice but to defend other people’s assets from flooding across the city, at huge cost, he anticipated.
“When you look at the shovel-ready projects, almost none of them have started, even though they were awarded conditional on being design-ready and ready to start within either six months or 12 months,” Bollard said. “That pushes us to another big issue which is our consenting process is complex, slow, legalistic, expensive, and we have huge room for people to be able to object to plans even when they are not actually closely impacted by them.”
MARK TAYLOR/STUFF
Dr Alan Bollard, chairman of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, speaks at the 2021 New Zealand Economics Forum at Waikato University. About 20 per cent of project budgets relate to consenting costs, and “in some cases a lot more”, Bollard said.
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