Land Near Airport

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28129, 19 November 1956, Page 10

Land Near Airport

Land near the Christchurch airport should not be built on, Cr. F. W. Walter admitted at the last meeting of the Waimairi County Council. It was time the council, as the controlling authority, did something about it, he added, in a masterpiece of understatement. The pity is that the council did not do something about it long ago, instead of encouraging subdivision up to the county boundary, which is too close for housing. Cr. Walter’s remedy is a conference of some of the interested authorities to decide to prevent building on these subdivisions. This is not quite as silly as it sounds, because Cr. Walter and the Waimairi Council propose that the building sections should now be bought by the taxpayers and ratepayers to prevent the use of the land for the purposes for which subdivision was approved. As the ■law stands that is the only way building can be prevented before the Metropolitan Planning Authority has its plan in operation. Purchase by public authorities might suit the subdividers, whose interests rather than those of other ratepayers have been studied by the council, very well, because they may have trouble in finding other purchasers for sections close to an increasingly noisy and potentially dangerous airport. As far as the taxpayers are concerned, it is an unjustifiable transaction, which need not have been contemplated if the Waimairi County Council had refused subdivisions beyond the urban fence and let the ordinary provisions of the Town and Country Planning

Act apply to any claims for compensation. The proposal for public purchase is not made any better because some of the price will be paid by Waimairi ratepayers, in spite of the objection of the chairman (Cr. W. E. Cassidy), who presumably thought the Christchurch City Council and the Government should find all of it. Although the Waimairi Council, in its three-year programme of subdivision, is primarily responsible for the grave threat to the future usefulness of Harewood, the Government and government departments cannot escape their share of the blame. It is absurd that huge sums of public money can be spent on building an airport without any power to keep its approaches clear, except from high buildings. Although this weakness in the law has only become apparent because of events in the Waimairi county, at least three Cabinet Ministers were well aware of it in time to heed the request of the Christchurch Metropolitan Planning Authority for amending legislation this year. The Government may have hesitated to take the necessary power because it did not want to face the issue of compensation. But the longer it postpones action the more difficult the question will become, unless airports in future are to be unreasonably distant from the cities they serve. While local authorities behave as irresponsibly as the Waimairi County Council has done, the Government cannot leave the protection of such an expensive asset to their whim. The Government should •take the ’ earliest opportunity to repair the results of its weakness. Even then it may find that too many houses have been built round Harewpod. Those already there will create a sufficient problem when the occupants start to complain in a few years about the noise, or when, as may happen, an aircraft crashes among them. Every new house in this locality will add to the problem.