Matt Cowley Tauranga City Councillor

During the next few weeks I'll outline key decisions in Tauranga City Council's Long Term Plan. This week I'm outlining the growing demand for sport venues.

Our LTP focuses on ‘weekend warriors' and grassroots sports. We're investing in new local sport fields in Bethlehem and Papamoa East during the next 10 years to meet the growing demand. We're also installing lights at existing grounds to maximise their use.

Despite the city's aging population, there is increasing demand for sport venues. We're also aware of people gradually shifting away from formal club membership to informal social competitions. Sport Bay of Plenty has helped us to project demand for grassroots sport during next decade.

The difficult decisions lie with specialised and high performance sport venues. We've been asked to help develop business cases to build new or improve venues for athletics, cricket, hockey, swimming, potentially another ASB (formerly TECT) Arena in the future, along with the ongoing rugby stadium debate.

Many sports are competing for limited funds. We can raise money from TECT, NZ Lotteries, and City Amenities Group to build the infrastructure, but council – or ratepayers – will likely be asked to cover the operational costs.

We will work with Sport BOP and others to build an unbiased framework for investing in the city's premiere venues. This is a better approach than the current first-in, first-served basis.

The exception to this rule was the urgent need to repair the athletics track at Tauranga Domain. We received guidance from Sport NZ and Athletics NZ to ensure it was not over-designed by meeting minimum standards to hold national tournaments.

We will fund half the costs of the new track, as well as require users to pay a fee to go towards replacing it in the future.

Feel free to email me your thoughts (matt.cowley@tauranga.govt.nz), call/text me on 027 6989 548, and follow me at www.facebook.com/a.younger.voice.