Building the right facilities at the right time

Today, the Council owns and operates 17 community facilities across the District. This includes sites like the Town Hall, MainPower Stadium, sport fields, community halls, aquatic facilities, libraries and more.

These facilities meet the needs of our community today. But with roughly 30,000 new residents expected by 2050, we need to plan and budget ahead of time to meet the future needs of our community.

We’re doing this via a review of our public facility strategies. This includes the recently completed:

Community Facilities Network Plan

This strategy identified opportunities to activate our spaces more, potential building sales, and financial contributions towards new facilities. It proposes an increase to building replacement budgets in outer years of the LTP of $3.8m to replace other key community facility halls and sports pavilions.

Aquatics Strategy

The strategy identified projects the community have requested. These include a hydrotherapy pool for Kaiapoi. A hydro slide was also assessed for Rangiora. These facilities have been costed at $15.0m in today's dollars. The Council has not added this investment to the draft Long Term Plan and have pushed these projects to outside of the 10 year time frame of the LTP.

Still to complete are the:

Sports facilities

This plan found that current investment is suitable to meet the needs of the community into the future. In the short term we need to make two pressing decisions.

Southbrook Sports Club needs upgrading, and potentially a new facility overall, which has been costed at $1.34m between years 2025–2028.

We are also looking to invest $0.5m towards the development of a new cricket Oval and training facility next to MainPower Oval. This will ensure the District continues to host first class cricket.

Provisional funding has been allocated for both projects. However, before we progress with design and build stages we will engage with the community again.

These plans will consider whether we have the right facilities, in the right places, and will guide the Council’s future investment into public spaces over the next 30 years.

We want to know if the community supports funding the review holistically as well as implementation of the short term projects identified.

OPTIONS:

A: Council’s preference

The Council wants to plan and budget ahead of time for community facilities to ensure Waimakariri remains a great place to live and play. The best way to do this is through a strategic review of our community facilities.

Concurrently there are projects we need to start before we can undertake this strategic review.

*This is a provisional sum and no decision has been made to include prior to further community engagement

B: No new funding is allocated

This would mean our community facilities aren’t developed in a strategic way that best benefits our community. In the short term we could miss opportunities to develop the Southbrook Sports Club and MainPower Oval in a way that best serves our current community. Option B has no impact on rates.