It can take years to resolve some disputes
ACTIVITY: Investigating, assessing and facilitating access disputes
Herenga ā Nuku opened 17 access dispute cases during the year. Two-thirds of the access dispute cases involved access issues over unformed legal roads.
Although unformed legal roads have the same legal right of access as formed legal roads, access cases about them can become complicated and emotional for the people involved. One example of such a case in the Buller region was first raised with us a decade ago. The adjacent landowners wanted access for hōiho, and potentially a horse-riding tourism operation, over an unformed legal road that follows the creek intersecting their land and past other properties to the beach.
In the past couple of years, our regional field advisor helped secure an agreement by all the parties concerned — including neighbours whose gardens or farm race would be affected, horse riders concerned about a safe passage to the beach, Waka Kotahi NZTA because the legal road access was on both sides of and effectively crossed a state highway, and the district council, both officers and councillors, as manager of the local unformed legal road. However, even though the parties have all agreed on the legal status of the access, challenges related to practical access can remain unresolved.
The importance of unformed legal roads means it is essential that we provide comprehensive, accurate advice to the councils that manage those roads. Because of that, we spent the year revising our book, Guidelines for the Management of Unformed Legal Roads. This has included consulting with territorial authorities across the motu and seeking an endorsement from Local Government New Zealand. We will print and issue this revised publication shortly.