shania.funurl.com

PARTIES AT LOGGERHEADS OVER TRACK

.

tvnz.co.nz
May 23, 2006

In exchange for getting thousands of hectares of countryside, pop star Shania Twain agreed to develop a tramping route through some of the South Island's most impressive landscape.

The Overseas Investment Commission allowed the Canadian singer and her husband Mutt Lange to buy 25,000 hectares of pastoral lease, with the walking track a condition of the sale.

But nearly two years later the track is stalled while the Department of Conservation (DOC) and a neighbouring farmer remain at loggerheads.

DOC has ignored the Wanaka farmer's trespass order and is completing the Motatapu public walking track that runs through his deer farm despite his requests to go to mediation.

"Every day you wake up in the morning and the first thing you think about is this stupid track," says Don McRae.

Twain and husband have given the track to the New Zealand public but it doesn't end up on their land and instead goes right through their neighbour's deer farm.

"The Overseas Investment Commission said they had to provide a track. Now we shouldn't be dragged into that argument at all. That was their business not ours. And just because they don't want it near their house, we don't really want it near our place either," says McRae.

The McRaes believe what DOC has done with the Langes is "to keep it away from their property and protect their privacy".

But DOC says it's the farmers who are trying to keep the public away.

Otago conservator Jeff Connell says through the Queen's Chain the public are entitled to use the land and the department was entitled to link that with an opportunity offered on an adjoining property.

The McRaes agreed to two other public tracks on their high country station during a decade of tenure review. They says negotiations for another should have been done back then.

But Connell says DOC can't know when a public access opportunity is created.

"We can't see into the future and see exactly how it's going to be used," says Connell.

The McRae's argue that "public access opportunity" was never clearly spelt out and that the walk up their stream is a bad choice.

"It's pretty dangerous, narrow, there's a lot of bluffs and waterfalls," says Don McRae.

The local community board has never supported the Fernburn Stream route. Spokesman Bill Gordon says local knowledge raised alarm bells with them because of the degree of difficulty.

"There could have been easier options that a lot more people could have enjoyed," he says.

Shania and Lange offered an alternative on their own land - a fall-back if the route through their neighbours proved impossible. But DOC says the ridge involved is too steep and exposed.

The singer has paid $215,000 towards the track so far and the work through her neighbour's land began briefly two months ago before the McRaes put a stop to it.

DOC has now gone back in there to finish the job.

.