16 March 2009
Media release
For immediate release
Society litigation is foolish

The Horticultural Protection Society, which wants to rip up the $2million athletics track at the Regional Sports Park, has scored an own goal with its latest legal attack on the Park says horticulturist and Sports Park Trustee Rex Graham.

The Society has initiated a judicial review of the consent process for the athletics track and grandstand at the Regional Sports Park

“The Society wants to protect fertile Heretaunga plains land. But the fact is Society members themselves have more land under concrete than the sports park ever will have.

“The Heretaunga plains are special and they are fertile, but it doesn’t prohibit their use for anything other than growing food and in any event this is an evolving science. Flaxmere is located on some of the best red wine growing country in the country, but when it was developed the land was thought to have no productive value because it wasn’t suitable for orchards or market gardens. So in the long term we can’t actually say what is, and isn’t productive land, and shifting the athletics track on these grounds cannot be justified,” he says.

Mr Graham said the track and grandstand at the Sports Park collectively occupy approximately 1 ha of ground and were being used by a few individuals to throw a spanner in the works.

“Athletics New Zealand tell us we have the best athletics track in the country and the Society is deluded if it thinks the Hawke’s Bay Community, especially its thousands of sportspeople, will sit by and let it be ripped up,” he says.

ENDS

© Scoop Media