The owners of Sticky Forest and the Queenstown Lakes District Council (QLDC) will take their cases to the Environment Court on July 31 in Queenstown.

Mediation between the two parties was cancelled last winter and it was announced the case would instead go to court. 

Sticky Forest is an area of approximately 50 hectares of forested land in Wānaka between the Clutha River outlet and the Kirimoko residential subdivision.

Over time a number of mountain biking and walking tracks have been formed there and are now used regularly by members of the public and maintained by local groups. 

But the forest is not a reserve: it is held by the Crown for around 1,800 descendants of 57 original Maori grantees who were given the land under the South Island Landless Natives Act as substitute land for settlement redress after they lost ownership of the Hāwea-Wānaka block known as ‘The Neck’.  

The mediation was sparked after one of the grantee’s descendants, the late Mike Beresford (acting as an individual not as a representative of the group), sought to have about 20 hectares of the forest rezoned to allow for residential development.

The list of owners of the land has since grown to around 1,800 individuals.

After his submission was rejected by the QLDC on the advice of independent commissioners, the decision was appealed to the Environment Court, which requested the owners’ group and the QLDC enter mediation to resolve the issue.

With the cancellation of mediation, “evidence has been filed with the Environment Court by all parties and the court has set a hearing date for week commencing July 31 in Queenstown,” a QLDC spokesperson told the Wānaka App this week.

Bike advocacy group Bike Wānaka wants Sticky Forest to become a community asset, and Bike Wānaka spokesperson Simon Telfer told the Wānaka App last year he hopes to be able to share with the owners “how deep a connection many people in the Wānaka community have to the land and forest”.

The issues around Sticky Forest have been described by independent commissioners as a “conundrum provided by the unique set of circumstances surrounding this land”.

PHOTO: Supplied