Underground for some

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

TELECOMMUNICATIONS company Chorus will take down some of its newly installed aerial fibre-optic cables on Moana Road and put them under-ground but residents are now pushing for a full resource consent review to remove the cables from the view of all 100 homes.

Residents on the beachfront street have been expressing their discontent since last week, when work started to install overhead cables to supply broadband internet and resident Mark Clapham this week lodged an official request that Gisborne District Council review the consent because it contained inaccuracies.

An assessment of environmental effects, carried out as part of the resource consent procedure, said the consent application had been put forward as essentially an “area-wide” consent for the whole of Gisborne city.

Mr Clapham said he would urge the council to exempt Moana Road from that consent.

However, the assessment also noted that communication for the overhead consent has been undertaken prior to the application being formalised through separate meetings with the mayor and council planning staff.

No specific issues of concern were raised by the mayor or staff.

Chorus stakeholder communications manager Nathan Beaumont said further work was planned to ensure that all cables complied with existing consent conditions.

That would be achieved by either raising cable height, or, in a few cases, putting cables under the ground.

“Unfortunately some cables were installed too low on these poles in Moana Road, and this has meant that in some cases we do not meet the requirements of our resource consent for this work.

“We have apologised to residents for this mistake and are we currently working to fix this so we comply with our resource consent. Some of this work will see the cables raised to ensure that we meet our resource consent requirements and in other cases, and only where we can’t physically do this, we will place the cables underground.”

Resident Jodie Sutherland said it was though cables could go under ground in front of about 10 properties but that was “not good enough” because about 90 other properties would not see any change.

“A full review of the original consent is our best hope I think to get things changed and have the whole cable put underground.”