Five months after being established, Christchurch's new recovery agency still needs to make key staff appointments as it plans public meetings on the future of the city's residential red zone.
Christchurch's red zone. Photo: RNZ/Conan Young
Regenerate Christchurch was created in April, but is still to finalise when the first of its public meetings on the development of the red zone will be held.
The joint city council and Crown organisation has been tasked with developing regeneration plans for the central city, the red zone and New Brighton.
The agency has previously said that a series of public meetings would begin in September about the future use of the residential red zone.
Ivan Iafeta - who has been chief executive since mid-June - told RNZ dates for the meetings were yet to be finalised, but they would start later this month.
He told RNZ September marked the start of the public discussion.
"At the moment there's a lot of information that agencies have, and have access to, but the community is a big part of this conversation. So the first step is about balancing that information and knowledge ledger to ensure we're all operating off the same information.''
He said the conversation with the community would start later this month about what those next steps would look like.
"There'll be information that's released later this month, as well as a number of different forums for people to engage with Regenerate Christchurch. Meetings are definitely one option, but people are busy and we want to make sure they have different forums and opportunities to engage and to provide feedback.''
He said there was existing technical information held by the city and regional councils that the agency wanted to make more accessible to the public.
"We understand that information has been collated and we want to make it available so people understand the different aspects of the land through the resident red zone.'
"It's difficult for people to understand how those different hazards and impacts across the land impact on each other. It's quite helpful to have the information collated in one place and overlaid, so that people can start to see what has happened to the land in terms of land height, susceptibility to flooding, liquefaction, lateral spreading, contamination and a whole range of other factors.''
Mr Iafeta said 25 staff appointments also had yet to be made at the agency, but he hoped to make appointments in the next few weeks.
Today marks the sixth anniversary of the September 2010 Canterbury earthquake that caused damaged throughout the region. In April the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority was wound up and replaced by Ōtākaro and Regenerate Christchurch.
