Tasman District Council has started the challenging task of working through the issues associated with the Richmond West hearings. In 2007 Council rezoned more than 200 hectares of land for residential and business purposes in the Lower Queen Street area in Richmond and in recent months has been considering the 150 submissions it received.
Mayor Richmond Kempthorne today announced that as a preliminary decision the Council had decided to revert that part of the Beach Road area that was zoned Mixed Business and was previously Light Industrial, back to Light Industrial.
“Many of the submissions we received were concerned that Council had unreasonably constrained redevelopment opportunities in the Beach Road area and we have accepted those submissions,” said Mayor Kempthorne.
“While we are working through the many other issues we wanted to release this decision as we are aware that some landowners want to make progress with site redevelopment proposals.”
Mayor Kempthorne said that the intent behind the Mixed Business zone was to ensure “clean” industry and commercial land uses would be the future land uses in this area, which is close to the Waimea Inlet and the existing Richmond commercial area. The Council will revisit some aspects of this at a later date but was keen to set the current proposal aside to give certainty to concerned landowners.
The Council will formally notify this decision in the next few weeks when changes to the planning maps are made.
