Share your views

As a Council, we are keen to know what is important to you as we develop the Voluntary Residential Property and Property Rights Purchase policy for Category 3 properties in the Hastings District.

Please provide your views and responses to the questions below by Tuesday 5 September.  We appreciate the time to respond is short, but we are very keen to get the policy developed as soon as possible so we can then start the offer process and give some certainty to our cyclone impacted residents.

Policy principles

There are currently 308 provisional Category 3 properties, of which 147 have a residential dwelling within the provisional Category 3 area.  While the policy has not yet been developed and any decisions will be subject to the outcome of the LTP Amendment deliberations, some guiding principles have been developed as the basis for the policy.  The following principles do not yet constitute HDC’s policy and refer to confirmed Category 3 areas, which are yet to be finalised (they are currently still provisional):

• There is a significant risk to life for people living in dwellings on Category 3 land and, as no effective flood protection systems or mitigation can feasibly be developed, it is deemed unsafe to live there.
• HDC will make an offer to all property owners that have a residential dwelling on their Category 3 land, whether they are insured or not.  
• The offer will be based on a pre-cyclone market valuation and will be either an offer for the entire property, or in the case of mixed-use and larger properties the residential part of the property. The objective of doing so is to remove any residential uses from Category 3 areas.  
• The agreement with the Crown does not provide for purchase of non-residential uses.  At this stage, it is not intended that any offer will be made in respect of land not containing a dwelling.