After taking a caning over allowing the city plan to be subverted in favour of a Tauriko developer, the Tauranga City Council is getting around the problem by changing its rules.

City Plan change 18 approved by the council Strategy and Policy Committee this month for detailed development and consultation with affected parties, allows the pumice mining at Tauriko that was previously rejected by the Commissioner.

The Gargan plateau from Taurikura Drive.

In 2015, independent hearings commissioner Alan Watson denied developer TBE2 Ltd's application for major earthworks on the Gargan Road plateau at the southern boundary of the Tauriko business estate.

The developer sought consent for large scale earthworks that would see the removal of 1.1 million m3 of pumice from the plateau and the sale of 60 per cent of it.

In his decision, Alan Watson criticised the developer for attempting to subvert the existing City Plan, and the Tauranga City Council for going along with it.

'This has implications for the confidence the public can have in the Council's consistent administration of, and indeed the integrity of, the City Plan when it can be sought to be changed without having due regard to the provisions in the Plan and the earlier Court proceedings as these apply to the residents of the Plateau.”

Change 3 of the six proposed is making quarrying incidental to earthworks a restricted discretionary activity.

So if earthworks are required for say, the removal of Gargan Road, then the material that is incidentally quarried during that operation can be sold.

Change two of the six proposed changes to the plan is for the Gargan Road realignment and the removal of 74,000 cubic metres of material.

Preliminary design work was undertaken to upgrade Gargan Road which will provide access to Stages 2B and 3B of the development.

Some challenging issues were discovered, including:

*Ten metre earthworks will have to be cut into Gargan Road to achieve acceptable industrial road gradients. Consequent cut batters into properties either side of Gargan Road will result in significant areas of steep unusable land and loss of one residential dwelling.

*There will also be a requirement for a temporary detour road through private property while Gargan Road construction takes place.

*It means Gargan Road residents will no longer have access from SH29, instead it will be via a new road up the escarpment from the end of Taurikura Drive.

City council planners say the new alignment has a number of advantages over upgrading Gargan Road such as making more developable land, improving the interface between sites and the road, avoiding significant traffic disruption during construction and reduced construction costs.

The current alignment of Gargan Road down the escarpment will be abandoned on the completion of the new road.

Alan Watson also turned down TB2 Ltd's application because the effects of the dust of the Gargan Road residents would be more than minor and there was potential difficulty in mitigating the dust effects to an acceptable level.