After a great many stumbling blocks, the Motueka pool project is a significant step closer with $1m of rephased funding for a design-and-build contractor. This is following a 2022 feasibility study, and the Tasman District Council’s purchase of a large parcel of land off King Edward St in 2023.
The rephased funds are a part of the $15 million allocated for the project in the Council’s 2024–34 Long Term Plan. Motueka Aquatic Centre Fundraising Committee chair Ross Loveridge says the council’s rephasing of funds is a clear sign of its commitment to the project.
“It means preliminary work can begin earlier, giving us strong confidence in the reality of this build.”
The rephasing enables Council to procure a contractor, moving the project into its next stage. Long-time campaigner Fred Hickling says they are closer than they have ever been, and although “we can’t rule out a meteor hitting”, the project should proceed. Fred looked back over his decades of involvement, recounting the early false starts that have led the committee to where it is today.
The project was first mooted in the late 1980s, with the opening of the Motueka Recreation Centre.
Pam Holyoake, who was one of the recreation centre’s founders, was interviewed upon the facility’s opening in 1986 and commented that all the community needed now was a swimming pool next to it.
Around 1990, a committee was formed and the project’s community involvement began. The following years were spent fundraising and raising public awareness.
The recreation centre remained the default option for the pool site, but a feasibility study found that the water table was quite high, so “it put the muckers on that for a while”, Fred reckons.
A referendum held in the late 1990s narrowly went against the idea of a pool, with only about 100 votes separating the yays from the nays. In part, “the whole country was in a rate rise scare” and the mood was cautious.
At that point, the whole thing should have been dead in the water, but Fred reckons they were already too many sausage sizzles in to forget about the project.
“Some of us don’t give up,” he says with a shrug.
In the early 2000s, Parklands School was being eyed as the next potential site.
The centrally-located kura needed a pool, was eager to collaborate and had plenty of space on their back fields. However, after years passed and no concrete progress had been made, the school proceeded on their own, with their private facility opening in 2009.
Around this time, the pool committee was getting so frustrated that “they were ready to pull the pin,” says TDC councillor Barry Dowler.
He suggested that the pool committee be subsumed by Good Sports Motueka, the charitable group that had built Sports Park’s grandstand in 2005.
Another setback was on the cards shortly after. The pool project was submitted into the 2009 Long Term Plan, but was only in the document for a matter of hours. The issue was revisited after lunch, and Barry recalls that “at 2’oclock in the afternoon, it was out” after a couple of councillors changed their votes.
After that snub, Fred reckons the committee changed tack. “We thought, bugger it. We’ll go it alone!”
They made the call to look at covering and heating the existing pool at Motueka High School, utilising external funders. Several years were spent working on this option, with a feasibility study presented in 2017. However, they hit a snag – the funding organisations wanted the security of council involvement before they would commit any funds themselves.
“So much for going it alone,” Fred says wryly. “Off we went, back to the council!”
However, it was discovered that the TDC could not invest into infrastructure that is not on council land.
The committee was deflated by this set-back. “That’s when we said, oh, wait a minute – we’ll jump the fence to Sports Park,” Barry remembers.
They shifted focus to this TDC-owned site, which could share some of the high school’s facilities and offer increased capacity.
It was not big enough though, with the council eventually determining that it could not commit funding for a facility that was not future-proofed. Fred said that news was frustrating, but he could see their point – there was no space for future expansion on that site.
The team went back to the drawing board, but a reprieve wasn’t far off. Barry says in 2023 the council staff identified a site in King Edward Street that had possibilities, and the councillor, who knew the landowners, was straight on the phone. It turned out that they were about to put the property on the market, and so Barry passed on their contact details to the council staff to see if the two parties could reach an agreement.
“Blow me down, by 5pm the next day, they were talking onions,” he laughs.
Although the project is not at the point of putting shovels in the ground, Barry is cautiously optimistic.
“It’s on a roll,” he says. “Council staff are doing their bit to make it happen.”
Fred says that now is the time for the community to really get behind this project, with this being “easily the strongest position we’ve been in”.
Looking back at his three decades of involvement in the project, Fred says every drop of effort has counted towards where they are now. He doesn’t regret it, although he thought he would have been jumping in the pool 25 years ago.
“This is it,” he says. “This is it. If we don’t do it now, we’re never going to get it.”
