Waterfront property owners are challenging the city council's assumed right to sequester private property for esplanade reserves.

Robin Rimmer from the Welcome Bay Waterfront Association outlining the association's grievances against the council at a recent City Delivery Committee meeting, says the association is also submitting on the Annual Plan.

The estuary at the foot of Waitaha Road. Photo: Supplied.

In 1997 the city council imposed a reserve set back of 15 metres above Mean High Water Springs on Tauranga waterfront properties – an action Robin says was taken without informing the property owners that they could no longer build on their former property.

'It's a set-back,” says Robin.

'It means that we still have title but what we did have was unencumbered free hold, but the set-back means it is no longer unencumbered. It's actually got quite strict restrictions placed on it.”

It means property owners will have to apply for resource consent for any construction within the set-back.

There have been a few examples where people have bought a waterfront property thinking they might be able to extend the house or do something else and they have been prevented because of the set-back.

The set-backs don't appear on the LIM reports, says Robin.

'From a purely legal point I'm told a LIM report doesn't have to have it written down. It can just mention that there is such a thing as a city plan – and then it's up to individuals to try and find somewhere in that city plan where there might be a provision like a set-back.

'They could quite easily put them on the LIM reports.”

Waterfront property owners haven't had a very open or honest response from council, says Robin.

'I don't know if they are actually burying it, but they are more likely disregarding it rather than burying it, if you know what I mean.”

They were told the set-backs, the 15 metre extensions to the coastal reserve strip were established in 1997, and confirmed in 2005.

'But the first that any single land owner that we can find anywhere in Tauranga knew about it, was in 2009,” says Robin.

They learned about it through a letter in the paper warning the council was about to arbitrarily increase the set back above MHWS from 15 to 20 metres – or one chain.

The esplanade reserves were being promulgated as an environmental measure, says Robin.

'We as community would find it difficult to be scape-goated on the issue of environmental protection when the council itself hasn't got a very good record of its own. In other words double standards if you like.

'Taking a large set back instead of a small sensible one is putting a fairly draconian measure in place without consulting people properly and when set against their own standards of environmental irresponsibility, you naturally get discontent.”

The extended 20 esplanade reserve was defeated in the environment court says Robin. But the waterfront property owners were not able to alter the existing 15 metre reserve.

Robin says the appeal was not necessarily against the esplanade reserves, but against the reserve strips being imposed without any consultation with or listening to any input from property owners.

'We wanted in principle to be involved. That was the whole point.”

Part of his presentation involved showing councillors pictures of the rubbish accumulating but not being collected from esplanade reserves about the city, and in Welcome Bay which has become a litany of bad environmental calls by the city council.

It dates from when the developers first moved in and the floods of silt that entered Welcome Bay setting the environment up for the take-over by mangroves. The family also photographed and presented to councillors the environmental damage created by the city council when it installed the sewer along the foreshore.

'I was highlighting the issues all property owners have around estuaries,” says Robin. 'We don't think our estuaries are doing well enough, and there's a double standard in picking on land owners when some of the problems the council could deal with, if they felt they wanted to.”