Heritage on North Shore

The Strategy establishes a platform for historic heritage management in the City, which will benefit both Council and the community by providing a more structured transparent and robust process of thinking about heritage on a city-wide basis. It identifies critical issues for the City in respect of historic heritage management, contains action plans required to address these, and the amount of funding from within existing Council budgets that can contribute to the implementation of the Strategy. Importantly, the draft Heritage Strategy identifies additional funding required if the action plans are to be fully implemented and the overall objective achieved, and two options for delivering this, that require testing through the LTCCP process. This report discusses the benefits and risks associated with the two options.
While Council as an organisation is carrying out its responsibilities for heritage in a variety of ways, it is not doing so in a well-recognised, integrated fashion. In addition, its role, and that of the many other groups who have an interest in and responsibility for working together to achieve the community’s vision for heritage, is not clear or agreed. This makes it difficult for both Council and the wider community to be confident that the Council’s policies and actions are clearly aligned with the community’s vision, or for Council’s (and other groups’ actions) to be monitored against agreed performance measures.

Expected benefits of the Heritage Strategy are that it:

Provides a structured process for Council and the community to think more broadly about heritage on a city-wide basis. This will help identify aspirations and develop a vision, partnerships, and directions that stretch beyond the statutory requirements.
Develops an integrated and coherent approach to the management of the community’s significant heritage resources by establishing agreed broad level actions, to be undertaken by both Council and other groups, on behalf of the community. These actions are accompanied by timeframes which are to be used as performance measures for the three yearly reviews of the Strategy.
Establishes a direction for addressing the new requirements for historic heritage introduced by the 2003 amendment to the Resource Management Act (RMA), and community expectations regarding the standard to which Council will meet these responsibilities.

Identifies the scope of Council’s current and future commitment to heritage management, including its commitment to explore new initiatives.

The draft Strategy’s stated objective is to effectively facilitate:

Identification of the historic heritage resources of the city.
Protection of the historic heritage resources of the city for present-day residents and future generations.

Education of city residents and visitors about the fascinating History and heritage of the city.

Again I emphasise that Council has no option but to consult.

I also want to correct an item on P. 5 of the same issue og Flagstaff regarding the 'Devonport heritage blunders force council to review plan' headline. I note taht the previous council seems to have made a number of heritage blunders and that was one reasons that I stood for concil. However, the plan changes and review were instructed long before the Masonic incident. I welcome teh review of commercial buildings in heritage zones but a few councillors have being working hard to get this implemented well before the current issues arose. Over the last year this Council has devoted a great deal of energy into protecting heritage on the Shore. Councillor Tony Holman and I, supported by Mayor Williams were instrumental in getting Council to agree to a plan change that we hope will provide greater protection to commercial sites as heritage areas within or abutting heritage areas. This Heritage Strategy is another major step but we cannot do it, by law, without going through this process.

I would also be grateful if you could encourage as many as possible to submit to the LTCCP in support of the Heritage Strategy.