Mount Maunganui landslide: Community meeting to update on progress to re-open Mauao

Almost 100 days since the Mt Maunganui landslide that killed six holiday-makers, the first community meeting with council will take place on Thursday evening.

It's to give an update on re-opening Mauao which has been closed since the tragedy and comes amid unease from some at the progress so far.

It also follows a separate recent meeting aimed at businesses, with one attendee at that gathering saying business owners "were all extremely aggro".

"I can say that quite plainly just with the lack of information that's been given to us in the three months that this has been going on," Gail Fagan said.

The Mt Maunganui accommodation provider said businesses were very disappointed with the council.

"We are hurting as the businesses that are concerned, a lot of businesses are down 50% or even more because people aren't coming to the Mount," she told RNZ.

"So the last few months have been extremely frustrating for most of us."

Fagan was not sure if the frustrations she said businesses had would be felt by the wider community at Thursday's meeting.

Ahead of the 5pm gathering, Mt Maunganui Ratepayers, Residents and Retailers Association president Michael O'Neill said his group had considered protest action.

"There has been a mood and a call from within our association that if something wasn't underway within three months then should we not put together some sort of protest and all go down there and put some pressure on the council through that medium," he told RNZ.

"At the moment we're sort of waiting on what's going to happen at the meeting tonight to see if we need to progress that any further."

O'Neill said there was genuine frustration in the community about Mauao's ongoing closure.

"When is this finally going to happen? How long is it going to take? So we're not holding hope there'll be any great outcomes at the meeting the council's holding tonight."

O'Neill said tracks had been restored at Welcome Bay by neighbouring Western Bay of Plenty District Council.

"And our council hasn't even started to progress any sense of shovels in the ground."

Tauranga mayor Mahé Drysdale told RNZ before the meeting that it is a certainty the mountain will open again.

"It's great to be able to announce that it is re-opening... but there are processes to go through," he said.

Drysdale wrote to Tauranga MP Sam Uffindell and Bay of Plenty MP Tom Rutherford this month after the pair relayed concerns about the ongoing closures.

The mayor told the MPs that the council's best estimates had Mt Maunganui's summit being months away from opening, but the base track being closer to a year or more.

He also wrote that 42 slip sites on walking tracks had been inspected, with 24 of them falling into a "moderate-severe" or "severe" category.

Drysdale told RNZ the time estimates still stand.

"We just don't know, and that's why we are being vague," he said.

Drysdale also said while the council wanted to give people certainty and clarity, it was also working through a re-opening that can be done safely.

"But we've got agreement. We've got contractors starting next week to remediate the tracks, and we've got a plan to access the summit, so that's what we're very much working through at the moment and as soon as we can do that then there will be that sort of staged re-opening once we can get people safely to the summit," the mayor said.

"Around the base track is going to take a lot longer because there are just significantly more slips, a lot more work to be done," he added.

"But we want to restore what we can when we can and do that as quickly as possible within the safety constraints because we understand how important this is for everyone and how businesses etcetera are struggling with the loss of the use of Mauao."

The mayor also acknowledged there was frustration in the community about the Mount, which was a treasured and deeply special landmark.

Accommodation manager Gail Fagan said business were not happy with the level of communication coming from Tauranga City Council.

"Until that meeting the other night [for businesses] we didn't know what was happening, we still basically don't know what's happening because they're still waiting for all the red tape and the information and the reports and all that sort of thing," she said.

"We do feel that probably the weather has been good enough that there could have been action on the mountain and things could have been starting to open up."

Drysdale said after those frustrations were raised at the meeting for businesses, the council would communicate more.

"That's a lesson for us and going forward we want to be better and we'll tell you what we know, that's what these meetings are about," he said.

"I guess we haven't had a lot of information and that's why we haven't shared, but I think what we heard from the business community is even if you have no information, tell us... tell us what you're doing and that's fine if you don't know, but just let us know and let us keep informed about the progress."

Drysdale said it was only a few short months ago that there was a tragic loss of life, and that would never be far from the council's mind as decisions are made.

Michael O'Neill from the ratepayers association said there was a feeling of "gatekeeping" with only bits of information being released.

"As I said, we're not holding our breath that things are going to happen as fast we we want them to but certainly there's a strength of feeling that we should be back on the Mount by now, at least having the spades in the ground or doing some work to return the tracks to what they should be and for the public to be able to use them again."

Thursday's community meeting, at Club Mount Maunganui, is from 5pm-7pm and Drysdale said there would be "no secrets".

"It's just 'this is what we know, this is what we don't, and these are the processes that we're going through to go forward'."

Timelines according to the mayor

SUMMIT TRACK - "We know we've got a minimum of 8 to 12 weeks of remediation work to do to remediate that and then we've got a couple of access issues around getting safely through the land slide run-out zone, so once we can solve those then we can tell the community exactly when that's going to be... it's going to be months away and it's not going to be weeks away, unfortunately."

BASE TRACK - "We haven't got a plan yet of exactly what every single slip is going to take to remediate it, we're working on that at the moment... that would be my expectation that we're probably talking closer to a year than months."

HOT POOLS - "The pools and the campground are both in the landslide sort of run-out zone, is what we call it, so we've got what we call a TARP - which is a Trigger Action Response Plan. And so what we're going to do now is what we call a quantitative landslide risk analysis, and that's just understanding what are the risks in each bit of land, how much of a risk is there, and then we can look at what are the mitigations that we could put in place to help that risk. And then, obviously that will inform our decision making, so the quantitative landslide risk analysis is due in July and once we have that and we can understand, then that will inform the timeframe for that."

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