Context
The Ten-Year Plan is where the council’s long-term strategy is outlined, along with the related work programme and budget. It is renewed every three years, setting out the council’s high-level, forward-thinking goals. It is the perfect place for the council to programme and fund the research, analysis and consultation that is necessary to inform future decisions regarding the spatial planning of Frankton Flats and the district’s air connectivity needs.
So far, in all its work and considerations the Queenstown Lakes District Council has held the predetermined view that Queenstown Airport must forever stay and grow in Frankton. It has shunned and obstructed any information that might suggest otherwise.
Under duress and with elections imminent, Mayor Boult commissioned a report on the social and economic impacts of four alternative airport scenarios. Tellingly, that study’s terms of reference precluded any closure of Queenstown Airport. The MartinJenkins report determined insufficient capacity at Queenstown Airport and that within 10 years a new regional airport would be needed. Since receiving the $300,000 report, councillors have never met to present, consider, discuss, or workshop its findings.
It is deeply concerning that the Council remains blindly fixated on a predetermined path and is not prepared to seek better information on alternative long-term strategic options.
Our work has identified many substantial benefits from the high-density urban development of Frankton Flats. In this oral submission to the Ten-Year Plan, we focused on the financial benefit to Council and ratepayers.
Ten-Year Pan hearing
May 10, 2021
Ko John Hilhorst ahau. I’m here speaking to Gillian McLeod and FlightPlan2050’s submissions to the Ten-Year Plan.
Kiā Ora. Tēnā Koutou Katoa.
The Ten-Year Plan is about money and timing. So, I’ll start on the topic of money.
The Money
This council holds its cap out to the central government for handouts while refusing to reach for the gold in its own pockets. The rich kids pretending to be paupers. We need, you say, a visitor levy, millions for a bypass, shovel-ready cash, and millions to kickstart economic diversification. Gimme, gimme, gimme…
The whole while you have refused to even acknowledge the billions of dollars of resource that you, the ten people at this table, control.
Christchurch International Airport Ltd has offered to build a full-sized, new airport for this region. One that could provide, according to the MartinJenkins report, all the long-term connectivity our district needs, and one that our district wouldn’t have to pay for. This could release 153 ha of prime land in the middle of what, according to the draft Spatial Plan, should become the district’s principal metropolitan centre.
Just think of the money. Frankton land, zoned high-density mixed-use, sells for $2,000 per square metre, so 153 ha owned by QAC would amount to some $3.1 billion. Call it TWO billion dollars once public space and infrastructure were allowed for. That’s money you choose not to see.
QAC transformation
QAC is fundamentally a property developer and manager. It could easily pivot from airport property to becoming the lead developer of the district’s largest metropolitan centre, home to 40,000 people and a thriving enterprise economy. QAC could become one of the largest and most profitable commercial property companies in New Zealand.
Multiple benefits possible
There is much more than money at stake. With Council owning, through QAC, the underlying land of most of the future town, it could massively help with affordability for housing and business. It would offer our district a fully integrated and fantastically liveable, carless metropolitan centre with the necessary substance and character to attract those high-value, knowledge-based enterprises that could provide a sustainable, low emissions and prosperous economic future for our district.
It would centralise all the Wakatipu’s networks of infrastructure and transport, massively enabling the mode shift needed for both transport and housing, all while protecting our outstanding environment.
But let’s focus on the money.
$2 billion for ratepayers
The $2-billion uplift in land value would belong to our communities, through the council’s 75% ownership of QAC. This is quite different from Ladies Mile or Jacks Point, where rezoning land benefits a few private property owners, making the rich richer but with little financial benefit for our communities.
QLDC would be guaranteed a minimum of $20 million additional rates from the rezoned, bare land, rising to $60 million as this was developed. Much more than the half-million dollars it currently receives in rates from the airport.
The whole of Queenstown Bay’s CBD amounts to just 15 ha of land area. Your company, QAC, could own 10-times this amount of land that would be in the absolute centre of a thriving town.
Rather than selling the land, QAC could innovate with long-term leases, Joint Ventures, and build-to-rent developments. QAC’s profits and its enterprise value would be massively greater if it became the lead property developer of Frankton than ever possible by continuing to own an airport. And it would generate far greater annual dividends to Council than the uncertain, pre-Covid, $5 million.
Councillors chose eyes closed
And yet, this council is pursuing the absurd notion that a Christchurch-owned regional airport near Tarras would threaten your financial investment in QAC.
You keep yourselves in the dark, not knowing the options or benefits of the alternative airport scenario because you refuse to have your council staff investigate. Every terms of reference for all relevant work, whether it was the Frankton Masterplan, the Rationale Report, the MartinJenkins report, the Spatial Plan, the Ladies Mile Master Plan, the Airport’s Annual SOIs, and here now the Ten-Year Plan, all these pre-determine, without question, that Queenstown Airport will remain and expand in Frankton. In none of them, do you allow council staff to investigate, discuss or advise you differently.
Personal leadership needed
There are ten votes at this table, and each vote is equal. We ask you to be accountable. Do you think that as a councillor you should remain uninformed of the alternative airport scenario? Will you refuse to have competent staff investigate?
This district is at a crossroads and needs to know which route to take. You are our leaders. We ask that you send out your scouts, people who can investigate and give you objective advice. We ask that you add such analysis and consultation, with appropriate funding, to this Ten-Year Plan.
Ngā mihi,
Thank you.