Reinvigorating Wanaka’s town centre planning process, with a community-driven impetus, is the key purpose of a new Wanaka working group.

“The goal is to create a town centre that’s a thriving place for businesses and a welcoming place for the community,” Ignite Wanaka chair Andrew ‘Howie’ Howard said.

Ignite Wanaka, Wanaka’s chamber of commerce, has invited a team of eight representing a range of local stakeholders to form the working group.

Over the years, a lot of time and effort has been spent on town centre public consultation, trials, plans and strategies, including Queenstown Lakes District Council’s (QLDC) Wanaka masterplan, Howie said, but “currently there’s no progress on the town centre masterplan and there’s no allocation of resources in the council’s 10 Year Plan to do anything”.

“We can’t afford to leave it for another 10 years and hope the town centre will survive,” he said.

Andrew ‘Howie’ Howard PHOTO: Supplied

Howie said the CBD must evolve and adapt to the changing environment, including the development of Three Parks which, for many locals, has changed the reason they now visit the town centre.

“Previous plans collected a lot of good consultation and ideas and we’re not going to forget about all that’s gone before; instead we need it to be a more community driven process.” 

Howie referred to the working group as “a ‘community-up’ process rather than ‘QLDC-down’ process”, where the group aims to have an understanding of potential development and an agreement across all stakeholders, which it can then take to council and work with council to achieve.

The stakeholders represented in the group include commercial and retail businesses, town centre property owners, urban planning and design, elected representatives from the Wanaka Community Board and QLDC, schools, and experts in movement (public and active transport, parking, pedestrians, etc) strategies.

A key aspect of the working group, Howie said, is that the representatives will report back to their stakeholders to ensure the working group doesn’t “operate in isolation”.

The initiative to establish the group came from a public meeting in July which focussed on potential future development of Wanaka’s central business district (CBD). Some of the stakeholder representatives volunteered after that meeting and others were ‘shoulder tapped’ by Ignite.

Howie said it was too early in the process to define the group’s terms of reference or what sort of town centre development issues and concepts the group might consider first.

That will be discussed at the inaugural working group meeting which is likely to be held before the end of this month, he said.