Right now we firstly need to just focus on “use” and the church is now clearly doing just that.

The building is at 34% NBS but only rated at 20% NBS which means a special use limitation of 50 people in the building at once.

Meanwhile we have Jetstar delivering us 63,875 more tourists a year, which at $50 a visit, could garnish $3.2 million annually. That’s before I consider the 74 cruise ships with an average of 2,500 passengers.

The building could host upto 4 tours a day at 200 people with ease, or $14.6m in income, but the council and government are standing in the way. That’s $146,000,000 over a decade of foreign money that our community wouldn’t have to put on debt.

For perspective, Hobbiton (Lord of the Rings), generates more than $100 million a year and that’s just a theme park on a remote farm in a hard to get to part of the upper north island.

We aren’t even trying.

The church is working hard to reconnect people with the building and mend broken bridges, but is the state?

Cr Mark Peters has called for a meeting, but what are they going to talk about?

I think the first, next, conversation has to be about pushing rules aside to allow this building to be well used while the next phase of planning happens.

Even 400 people a day is simply not enough. Hobbiton does 2,500 a day and pulls more than $100 per visitor. Are we ready going to be shown up by a wizard?