“What they’re basically doing is cutting down hills and using the tops of hills and getting that into gullies. So what they do there is they contour the land very gradually. I mean, there was one hill that we were on the top of - it was so wet that the mud nearly took over my boots. I took a bit of a wrong turn and just about sunk,” Gibson says.
While the final project is still decades away, Gibson says that the developers - made up of Kiwi Property, Fulton Hogan and Oyster Capital - are already thinking of the key facilities that the new city will need in the years to come.
“Clive McKenzie from Kiwi said to me they’re having discussions with the Ministry of Education now - not one, but actually three schools could eventually arrive out in Drury. So we could have two primary schools and one large secondary school. And you think about all the schools there are in Napier, you get an idea of the demand.
“The people who will be coming into this area, they will need medical, hospital, education, they’ll need all these services. So for Kiwi to be talking this early in the piece of a sort of a quarter-century plan about those important parts of a town centre, that gives me quite a lot of hope that they’re certainly thinking well ahead.”
So why exactly is this all taking place in Drury? How could the new city look in the end? And how receptive are the local residents to this new project in their backyard?
Listen to the full episode of The Front Page podcast to hear more from Anne Gibson on Drury East’s future.
The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am.
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