Council Approves TV Studio Site

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31169, 20 September 1966, Page 16

Council Approves TV Studio Site

The town planning committee remained firm in its views that the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation should be allowed to establish radio and television studios on land off Butler street, subject to height restrictions and landscaping, it told the City Council last evening.

The council agreed, with two or three dissenting voices but without discussion, that permission be granted.

The committee recommended the application a month ago, but it was deferred by the council. Solicitors for some residents of the district advised the council last evening that they proposed to test the committee's view that the studios were a public utility. Its grounds for recommending approval were that the facilities of the corporation were either a “public utility” or had such special characteristics making them akin to a public utility that they should be accorded zoning treatment similar to that of a public utility, the committee said. Accordingly, the corporation’s facilities should be treated as a conditional use in a residential zone. The solicitors, who said they were acting for Messrs P. J. Halligan, D. W. Rutherford, F. W. Brandt and others, said the proposed works were not a nublic utility. They offered to appear before the council or the town planning committee to give their reasons, but suggested the council’s legal advisers should be asked for an opinion. “Without wishing in any way to adopt a threatening attitude, we feel it is only fair to inform you that if the counci I does proceed on the basis that this is a public utility we shall issue proceedings on behalf of our clients in the Supreme Court,” the solicitors said.

Earlier in the meeting the Mayor (Mr G. Manning) presented a petition signed by

206 residents supporting the corporation’s application and saying that the proposed use would enhance the area that was now “a wilderness of unoccupied paddocks.”