LandEscape owner Rik Deaton has issued Queenstown Lakes District Council (QLDC) with an invoice of $15,000 for the recovery of costs in association with expert witness evidence submitted as part of his family’s application to change their property’s zoning.

LandEscape applied for a Rural Visitor Zoning over their 110-hectare property at Camp Hill Road through the plan review process, in order to develop agricultural tourism activities there.

In assessing the submission, QLDC carried out a seismic risk assessment of the property and identified a ‘no build exclusion zone’ some 500 metres wide and running the entire 1.4 kilometre length of the property, due to risk of surface rupture from to a fault line running beneath it. Deaton said this exclusion zone would have nullified any development on the property and rendered it “worthless.”

This assessment was based on an outdated Otago Regional Council (ORC) regional seismic risk report from 2015, which had been replaced in March 2019.

According to Deaton, this new report reclassified all known fault traces in the Upper Clutha Basin and located several new ones, including one located running directly under central Wānaka. It reclassified that under his property to “uncertain location”, lowered the annual slip rate and increased the recurrence interval from 5,000 years to 30,000 years. 

“QLDC completely ignored this new 2019 report and referred only to the now superseded 2015 report.”

Deaton said his family had had to commission two high level consultancy reports to “debunk the fake science of QLDC.”

The panel hearing was completed in September after final evidence in reply from QLDC's strategic planner, in which she confirmed she had “changed [her] opinion” and now supported the rezoning request. Council was currently waiting on the Proposed District Plan hearing panel’s recommendations before making a decision. 

In the meantime, Heron Investments (parent company of LandEscape) issued the invoice on November 2.

“The $15,000 invoice is to merely cover our costs in debunking [the expert witness evidence] but if we have to sue them we will be seeking punitive damages as well,” said Deaton.

QLDC spokesperson Jack Barlow said: “QLDC does not accept Mr Deaton’s claims or the basis for them, and rejects any notion of “false and misleading” expert evidence.

“While a QLDC expert did, mistakenly, initially omit a 2019 GNS report on seismic risks in the Upper Clutha, this was subsequently rectified and the report was taken into account.”

This is the second time Deaton has gone up against Council in recent times, having been turned down for a lakefront reserve commercial licence to rent e-bikes on the Wānaka foreshore last month.

Read edition 1005 of the Wānaka Sun here.