Source: Radio New Zealand
Members at Mangawhai’s Te Arai Links and its sister club Tara Iti will get an extension to keep taking their helicopters to the course. 123RF
High-flying members at one of Auckland’s most exclusive golf clubs have been given an extension to keep taking helicopters to the course.
It comes after Auckland Council issued abatement notices to Mangawhai’s Te Arai Links and its sister club Tara Iti to halt helicopter activity after a noise complaint.
Those abatement notices were due to come into force last week, but Auckland Council had recently extended the deadline to March 31 to give the clubs more time to apply for a resource consent.
“We have asked them to ensure flight plans do not impact on local residents,” the council’s field operations manager David Pawson told RNZ in a statement.
That wasn’t the decisive action that Dave Green, the Whangaripo resident who first made the complaint, had hoped for.
“I’ve lived here for 20 years. I bought the place in 2004, largely for the peace and quiet to get away from everybody. There were just a lot of helicopters flying over my property, especially on the weekend,” he explained.
“They’re quite loud. There were just several flights, you know, like one an hour or something just coming over my place. I’ve actually [had] one screaming over my bedroom at 7am in the morning.”
“The noise is very intrusive. You’ve sort of got to stop what you’re doing. You can’t hear each other yelling over the sound of a helicopter going, past the property.”
Green said that in the months since he first made the complaint, the number of helicopters had reduced.
“I’m not against helicopter flights to Tara Iti and Te Arai Links. Obviously, it’s a big tourist thing, and it’s great,” he clarified.
“What I’m pushing for is, can they change the flight path to be sort of more, you know, that neighbourly friendly kind of flight path plan where they’re not just flying over rural property?”
Green noted that Auckland Council was in a challenging position, given the high-end golf courses were owned by American billionaire Richard Kayne.
“If they have good reason for extending it till March… As long as we get a resolution that we can all have a talk about, you know, like a public submissions consent, then it’s fine,” he said.
“But if they’re just going to sort of do some dodgy backroom kind of deal with Ric Kayne and push something through without public notification, that won’t be fine.”
The Department of Conservation told RNZ there was a low flying exclusion zone over shorebird nesting areas in Te Arai.
That could limit helicopter operator’s options for an alternative flight path.
“To mitigate disturbance around Te Arai we worked with the Civil Aviation Authority to introduce in 2020 a low flying exclusion zone over the main shorebird nesting areas. This includes the dunes, beachfront, and stream mouth,” DOC operations manager Olivia Keane said.
“In the Te Arai area, our current conservation focus is on introduced predators, disturbance by people and dogs, weather impacts, and loss of habitat which pose far greater risks to wildlife [than helicopters].”
The operator of Te Arai Links and Tara Iti Golf Club declined RNZ’s request for comment.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
