An attempt to identify houses in Auckland City for heritage status is shrouded in secrecy and will alienate the property owners, says Hobson Bay Community Board member Julie Chambers.
She says a call for the public to nominate houses and other sites for heritage status favoured the council while putting costs and constraints on property owners.
Writing in the Herald, Julie Chambers said the policy was loading the cost of heritage protection on to individuals, was open to abuse and fraught with perverse outcomes.
"People who live in homes of heritage value have often either lived in them or purchased them because they love them.
"These people, rather than a city bureaucracy, are the best champions for the protection of their property."
About 500 houses and sites were nominated after several high-profile cases last year catapulted heritage into an election-year issue.
The prospect - subsequently abandoned - of an Edwardian home in Parnell's St Stephens Ave being moved to make way for apartments highlighted the inadequacy of the council's database of scheduled properties.
Since nominations closed, the council has begun assessing each house to see if it qualified to be granted a category A or B heritage status, followed by a publicly notified district plan change.
Julie Chambers, who nominated 10,000 addresses simply to highlight the issue, said between 40 and 100 properties could go through this process.
Instead of keeping the nominations secret until it got to the plan change process, the council would have been better off listening to the issues of property owners.
Hobson Bay Community Board member David Simpson said heritage protection was urgent.
"The Parnell chainsaw massacre needs to be stopped before there is nothing worthwhile left to destroy."
Heritage secrecy slammed
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