Blog - Notification Coming Soon

Notification

Andrew , 19 June 2008

Okay – so my last post on this blog was 18 September 2007. The web-savvy amongst us would say that this spells doom for a blog. But, now is really the time that it may come into its own. So first I will explain that comment and then I’ll tell a bit about what has happened since September last.

We are on the brink of our Mt Cass project going public as a Notified Resource Consent Application.  We expect that this will result in more interest in the development and more questions in people’s minds.  So, we have this site as another avenue for people to ask questions.

Some might be wondering why this is all taking so long – and occasionally I ask the same thing.  Last September I was busy compiling our resource consent application.  By the end of November we had lodged our application with Hurunui District Council, hoping to get publicly notified by Christmas but Council asked for a bit more information. 

Gathering that information and updating reports took a couple of months (with Christmas thrown in).  At the same time we launched into a more comprehensive survey of the site ecology.  Consultation and site visits with Forest and Bird, Department of Conservation, the Conservation Board and others made it apparent to us that ecology was going to be a big issue for this site.  My next post will go into this in more detail.

We had thought this detailed ecology review would be made public during the submissions period, and could be discussed during hearings.  But, in the last few weeks we realised that it made more sense to incorporate the new information into the application that will be publicly notified.   That way we should all be talking about the same thing during the submissions period and hearings.

We were able to make some substantial changes to the proposed road alignment and turbine locations which reduced the impact on native vegetation and cut back on earthworks volumes too.  This all resulted in another round of updates to drawings and key reports but the outcome is very positive overall.

So that brings us pretty much up to date.  There has been a lot more work than I expected and my thanks are due to all those that have helped make it happen. 

Submissions on our proposal are open until 1 August and we’re encouraging people to have their say.

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