KEY POINTS:
Fastfood giant McDonald's plans for a 24-hour drive-through restaurant near Auckland schools and a major intersection fall foul of public health policy.
McDonald's has sought resource consent from the Auckland City Council for the new restaurant about 30m west of the intersection of Dominion and Balmoral Roads.
It would also border Wiremu St, west of the Dominion Rd shopping strip.
Three schools are within 500m of the site - one of them opposite on Wiremu St - and two others are 750m away.
The Auckland Regional Public Health Service, which serves Auckland's district health boards, aims to improve nutrition through resource-consent processes. This policy is described in its 2006 "Improving Health and Wellbeing" report.
It includes: " ... restricting the location of high fat (primarily 'fast') food outlets from close proximity to schools ... ".
The manager of the service's healthy environments team, Sunil Kushor, said yesterday the service would make a submission to the council.
In addition to issues like traffic and noise, the submission would address the effects of the restaurant on the local population's health, and possibly its proximity to schools.
The public submission period closes tomorrow. Of the 72 submissions filed by Tuesday, 70 - many of them identical - opposed the development. The plan has galvanised many nearby residents into opposition. Two public meetings have been held and a residents group formed. "My main objection is, like most people, simply the scale of the development," said Nathan Inkpen, 39, who lives on Wiremu St with his wife and two children, aged 7 and 3.
The 159-seat restaurant will have 63 carparks on the site and five more on Wiremu St for general use. McDonald's expects some 1900 vehicles a day "on its busiest day". The building's Dominion Rd frontage would incorporate a shelter for a bus-stop used by school students.
Mr Inkpen said his family cycled on Wiremu St but that would end - "not with 2000 cars using that street a day".
The acting principal of Balmoral Seventh Day Adventist School on Wiremu St, Robert Minahan, said its main objection was the decreased safety of its 120 primary and intermediate pupils from the increased traffic.
The school also worked hard to inculcate healthy eating habits in pupils and having a McDonald's within metres "does make that a little more difficult".
In their submissions, residents argue the development is inappropriately large for the area, will cause traffic congestion, disturb the night-time quiet, attract youth crime and is at odds with the Government's healthy-eating-healthy-action schemes.
"If New Zealand is serious about creating healthier lifestyles, ... we need to look at how and why we are saturating suburbs with fastfood outlets," wrote self-confessed cheeseburger lover Chelsea Blickem, of Calgary St. "There is a KFC opposite, Burger King up Dominion Rd, Wendy's, Pizza Hut and Burger Fuel down Dominion Rd, and McDonald's in Pt Chevalier, Royal Oak, St Lukes and Greenlane roundabout. Isn't there enough already?"
A McDonald's spokeswoman did not want to comment before submissions closed.
How big
159-seat
McDonald's restaurant in Balmoral
24-hour
drive-through
63
car parks on site
About 1900
vehicles on peak days
