KEY POINTS:
Sixteen months after it was due to open, a $40 million North Shore supermarket remains shut because of a planning dispute.
But its owners hope the building's legality will be reassessed next year and they will eventually begin trading.
Developer and owner Foodstuffs (Auckland) has been barred from opening the Pak'nSave at Wairau Park since it was finished in winter last year. The store was due to open in the August. A long-running planning dispute has thwarted the supermarket chain, which has put up a large wire fence around the perimeter to secure the site.
Rival supermarket owner Progressive Enterprises took Pak'nSave owner the National Trading Co of New Zealand - a Foodstuffs (Auckland) subsidiary - to court, with the North Shore City Council, to block the project on planning grounds and won.
The saga, which has resulted in such a valuable building standing empty for so many months, has stunned many in the property sector, who say it has deterred them from even considering new developments.
Rob Lang, head of the $1 billion-plus AMP NZ Office Trust, said the legal challenge that had kept the Pak'nSave store shut exemplified an unfavourable development climate.
Lang's trust built the landmark PricewaterhouseCoopers Tower on Auckland's waterfront.
Murray Jordan, general manager of property development at Foodstuffs, said this week that the North Shore City Council had decided to process a new resource consent application on a limited notification basis.
"We anticipate there will be a hearing on the application in April or May of next year. You will be pleased to know that this brings us one step closer to our ultimate goal of opening the store and bringing Pak'nSave's policy of New Zealand's lowest food prices to this part of the North Shore."
The limited scope of the notification would mean only a small group of people would have a say in whether the Pak'nSave opened, Jordan said. "This group would basically include the supermarket's neighbours."
He was confident that, when the store went back through the planning hoops, it would get approval.
In the initial High Court action, Progressive - owner of the Foodtown, Woolworths and Countdown supermarket chains - joined the Northcote Mainstreet business group in the action and won.
Justice David Baragwanath ruled the council was wrong not to notify the application to build the supermarket. It was shut because its planning consent was overturned by the High Court at Auckland in June 2005. He found the council's decision was invalid.
