By Bill Wheeler, Operations Manager, TECT Park

Earlier this year, TECT Park, in the Bay of Plenty, was voted as a top 10 winner in the Green Flag International People’s Choice Awards, making it the highest-ranked park in New Zealand. Numerous infrastructure challenges and successes characterised the development of this all‑terrain playground that caters to diverse park users – from walkers and mountain bikers, to rally car drivers and target shooters.

There is probably a pithy quote or witty aphorism that sums up the very nature of TECT Park and its challenges and triumphs in providing public infrastructure to its users. The truth is that many of the clubs and societies that call the park home are there because the wider infrastructure needs of the Western Bay of Plenty have dispossessed them – roads, houses and water schemes taking over the spaces previously occupied by the district’s horse riders, shooters, and motorcyclists.

In 2010, TECT Park was opened as a joint project between Western Bay of Plenty District and Tauranga city councils to provide a home for those activities that were struggling to find a base in that fast-growing part of New Zealand’s central North Island. The growth in residential building not only placed a premium upon available development land, but forced many sporting disciplines to face the fact that they now had neighbours who didn’t share their enthusiasm for noisy and boisterous sports.

A new park

A production forest midway between Tauranga and Rotorua proved to be the ideal location for a new park, catering for activities that needed scale and seclusion that couldn’t be found close to Tauranga. Pine forests are not known for their extensive networks of public infrastructure, and one of the first tasks was establishing safe and sustainable access from State Highway 36. The resource consent under which the park operates stipulates that access can only be at one point on the state highway.

This was the first challenge, as the park itself straddles the highway and users must cross the route to access all areas of the park. The solution was an underpass – servicing a new section of road accessing the western side of the park. Not without its own challenges, the new road was named in recognition of former mayor and advocate for TECT Park, Graeme Weld.

Infrastructure for diverse needs

With access secured, it was then a matter of accommodating the clubs seeking a new home. With only 1650 hectares to play with, planning was paramount and clubs were grouped together according to their likely impact on others, their ability to work alongside similar sports and according to their need for infrastructure. The resulting Activity Zone Plan helped to prioritise the next stage of infrastructure development.

Motorsports, such as rallying, require little except for good access to forestry roads; but modern iterations of shooting disciplines, such as clay target, increasingly require power for floodlights and to operate remote-control targets. Five kilometres from the nearest mains power feed, there was significant debate about relying upon reticulated power, or taking the entire development off-grid through the use of solar and wind. Several factors helped to inform the final decision; 2010 solar technology was good, but not 2022 good, and the long-term cost of purchasing the panels and the need for periodic replacement of batteries suggested that while the upfront cost of reticulated power would be higher, in the long run, cost savings would be made.

To help with this process, the clubs were surveyed about their aspirations around electrical power and how they thought their developments would affect demand. It is fair to say that, at the time, these were just informed guesses and some clubs have found that their estimates were optimistic, to say the least. Others have found that power-saving technology has meant that their actual loads are far less than expected.

This project really highlights one of the great challenges of working with volunteers. There is a wealth of enthusiasm among volunteer groups and there is no doubting their talents as target shooters, horse riders or rally drivers – but having facilities to manage and plans to draw up tends to come a distant second to their enthusiasm for their sports. Human nature being what it is, people will also overestimate their needs and, in the hope of receiving more, will aim high. It is a truism that people always know what they want, but seldom know what they need.

Providing community infrastructure, even in a remote location for a community with such diverse needs, can be as simple as throwing money at the problem. The level of engineering input changes, and the complexity of the project varies, but often the bosses’ exhortation to ‘just build it’ is met with an insurmountable hurdle. This brings us to telecommunications.

Telecommunications challenges

TECT Park opened in 2010, without cellphone coverage, landlines or a reliable internet connection – something that would be unthinkable just few years later when even the simplest operation requires connection to the internet. Thrusting power cables or sinking drinking-water bores are straightforward tasks compared to securing a part of a nationwide telecommunications network.

New Zealand has seen several initiatives aimed at extending the mobile phone and broadband internet network into rural areas. It was the 2017 announcement of government support for the next stage of the Rural Broadband Initiative and funding to address mobile phone blackspots that finally saw TECT Park receiving external support for a cellphone tower. 

Despite this, there were still hurdles to overcome; cellphone towers require a stable power supply, albeit nothing like the enormous amount of power needed for the first-generation towers. Upgrading the park’s internal power network was a daunting task – both in terms of cost, but also logistically. Crossing five kilometres of native bush, pine forest and broken terrain was certainly possible, but at what cost?

Technology was to be the solution to this particular problem. New Zealand power provider Base Power was developing a new hybrid solar power solution that had applications nationwide for remote cellphone sites. Like the park itself, the TECT Park cell tower was ideally located, close to centres of population and accessible enough that the system could be monitored as a test site. So, having ruled out solar power in 2009, the park adopted it as a low-impact, sustainable solution to providing telecommunications coverage to park users and travellers along State Highway 36.

Once again, this project delivered what was needed, but not necessarily what was wanted by some users. Back in the 2000s, mobile phones were becoming more common, and many of the older park users had purchased phones, expecting them to be a once-in-a-lifetime purchase. Modern cell towers are almost exclusively fourth generation (4G), but many older mobile phones rely upon the previous third-generation (3G) technology. For more than a year after the tower went live, complaints still came in that there was no mobile phone coverage. Staff soon became adept at diagnosing phone settings and helping users to connect with the 21st century. 

Providing for the needs of a diverse community is not only about drawing plans and spending money; helping the community to understand what its needs are, and assisting them in the adoption of that infrastructure is just as important.

All images in this story courtesy of TECT Park.