By Jason Collie
AUCKLAND - Plans to protect the North Shore's 160km seashore are meeting guarded suspicion from its local coastal conservation group.
A range of building no-go zones based on each individual bay and headland's characteristics is being considered by North Shore City Council.
But the chairman of the Coastal Conservation Committee,
Alf Holt, said he was not convinced the change from present boundaries was necessary.
It comes more than four years after widespread dissent forced the council to ditch its proposed blanket no-development foreshore yard of 30m.
This proposal was supposed to unify the different protection zones the council inherited under local body amalgamation in 1989. Some suburbs had no-go zones of between 0 and 3m and others up to almost 30m.
The council is looking at four options - the blanket 30m, the status quo, encouraging people to protect their own property's coastline without any actual regulations, or its preferred option of the individual tailoring of each bit of coastline.
Councillor Margaret Miles said it would have more consistency because homeowners in different areas of the city with similar properties would get the same restrictions.
"It is far more realistic and takes on the constraints and recognises people's properties," she said.
But Mr Holt said a change was not needed because the present development restrictions had been decided by the city's previous councils based on the needs of each area.
The proposal might work, he said, but the council would need to show a lot of detail and would face natural suspicion after the controversy of its attempted 30m blanket zone.
"It is something of a leap into the unknown," he said. "We need to be convinced. Trust is something which is earned and the last council lost the trust of large numbers of citizens and ratepayers the way it approached the district plan."
Mrs Miles, chairwoman of the community services and parks committee, said councillors wanted to see aerial photographs of its whole shore before it wrote to coastal landowners and interested groups asking for their thoughts.
People would still own the affected land and those whose houses and structures went over the boundaries would not be forced to pull them down.
She said some building might be allowed within the foreshore yards.
