Less than a month before the election and behind closed doors, Tasman District Council has chosen to try and forge ahead with its plans to re-zone swathes of the district. 

Mayoral candidate and Hope-based urban designer Timo Neubauer has criticised the decision after he presented to the council on Thursday morning, urging elected members to wait until after the election.

Plan Change 81 is the Tasman council’s attempt to implement the first 10 years of its joint 30-year Future Development Strategy that it adopted in 2022 with Nelson City Council. 

The plan change, currently a draft, would rezone swathes of the district to allow for more housing, introduce a new medium density zone to encourage intensification, and allocate more land for commercial and industrial use. 

Neubauer has taken issue with much of the plan, but his focus has been on the planned rezoning of 29 hectares in Hope, immediately south of Richmond, from rural to light industrial and mixed business. 

He has previously presented a 400-signature petition to the council opposing those proposed zoning changes.

In his presentation to the council on Thursday morning, Neubauer raised concerns about the council making the decision in private session and so close to an election, the loss of productive land, and questioned the council’s demand forecasts for business land. 

“Shouldn’t the incoming council, with a fresh mandate, be the ones to make this generational call?” he asked. 

“Rezoning decisions are irreversible, economic conditions change, forecasts change, but once productive land is gone, it is gone forever.” 

But his pleas were unsuccessful as, immediately afterwards, the council agreed to seek an exemption from Environment Minister Chris Bishop so it could notify the plan change. 

The Government has said that councils must stop working on most of their plan changes unless given Ministerial approval. Notification would begin the process to accept formal submissions on Plan Change 81. 

“The lack of transparency and the rush and the means that are applied to make sure this gets all tied up before the election is mind-boggling,” Neubauer said after the council announced its decision.

“People are sick of more greenfield development, they want to see better intensification, yet this plan change lumps it all in one.” 

However, the council’s environmental policy manager Barry Johnson said the council faced legal pressure to rezone more land, with Tasman currently expecting a 360-home shortfall between 2028–2034. 

“Plan changes take a long time, and we are already behind in providing enough to meet demand. This timeframe has been discussed with the current council since the start of 2025, so it is not in haste.” 

He expected that concluding the Plan Change 81 process could take already 2–3 years, and that it could take a new council up to 9 months to get up to speed on the 2000-page project. 

Johnson acknowledged the “real tension” between protecting productive land and greenfield growth, but said growth needed to be feasible and realistic. 

“While it’d be nice to not have any more greenfield development, that’s not realistic; it’s not feasible, because it would do all sorts of weird things to the market.” 

Because the plan change dealt with providing greater home and business capacity, the council was confident it would be granted an exemption from the Minister. 

The council was also exploring whether it could get Ministerial approval to undertake a streamlined planning process. 

That process could be tailored by the Minister to determine timeframes to speed up the process, could remove requirements to accept further submissions, and limits appeals to points of law. 

Plan Change 81 builds off of consultation from the region’s joint Future Development Strategy, and targeted spatial plans for Richmond and Māpua. 

“We consider most issues have been addressed,” Johnson said. 

He added that the views contained within Neubauer’s petition were consistent with other feedback on PC81, which the council had considered alongside other perspectives, and that all sites proposed for rezoning were re-assessed following the recent flooding and were not needed to be changed. 

-Local Democracy Reporting is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air

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