Baypark master plan
The Baypark master plan is part of a wider Council-led project looking at how Tauranga’s three key active reserves - Mercury Baypark, Blake Park, and Tauranga Domain, and all of the community facilities located there - can best meet the needs of user groups now and in the future, and how these community spaces can be improved and made more accessible for everyone.
The overall project aims to create a city-wide network of venues for sports, recreation, and events, and is part of a wider strategy around future-proofing Tauranga's public spaces and reserves.
An integrated approach
Master planning for the three sites – Mercury Baypark, Blake Park, and Tauranga Domain – allows for a coordinated and integrated approach.
These plans aim to optimise the sites available as we’re currently limited by how much more land can be opened up to meet the increasing community demand for sports, recreation and event space in our rapidly growing city.
The Mercury Baypark site
The vast open and flexible spaces available at the Mercury Baypark site in Te Maunga, Mount Maunganui have the potential to be optimised and repurposed to cater to the city's growing population and increasing need for space to play sports and hold recreational activities and events.
The draft master plan for Mercury Baypark proposes a multi-use community sports and recreation hub, with athletics, netball and other court sports, speedway, gymnastics, as well as dedicated green spaces, a playground, and walkways. The draft plan proposes a future focus on community sport, while still delivering events, entertainment, and high-performance sport.
This could maximise the space available and create a versatile venue where both residents and visitors can play and compete at all levels, take part in recreational activities, and attend a wide variety of events. Mercury Baypark could be better equipped as a result to host large tournaments such as the AIMS Games, as well as day-to-day competitions and training sessions for popular sports such as netball.
Working together
We’re working closely with Bay Venues (the council-controlled organisation that manages Mercury Baypark), mana whenua and other partners, on the Baypark master plan. We’re also considering how it all might fit together and how co-location of current and future user groups could take place over time.
We continue to work closely with organisations and representatives involved in speedway, netball, and athletics to understand their requirements and discuss how co-location of current and potential future user groups could take place over time at Mercury Baypark.
The discovery phase of the project
In collaboration with Bay Venues, mana whenua and other partners, we’ve been working to better understand how the space at Mercury Baypark could be best maximised, while catering to the needs of current and potential future users. As part of this discovery phase, a range of technical work is being undertaken, including:
- Geotechnical investigations
- A site survey
- An air quality survey
- Traffic modelling
- An assessment of underground services (looking at both the location and capacity of services)
- A planning assessment
What’s next?
As part of the city-wide plan to improve and future-proof Tauranga’s shared green spaces and key active reserves, Mercury Baypark will become a multi-use community sports and recreation hub.
The vast open and flexible spaces available at the Mercury Baypark site have the potential to be optimised and repurposed to cater to the city’s growth and increasing community demand for space to play sports and hold recreational activities and events.
The Tauranga-wide Active Reserves programme is funded through the capital programme. Additionally, we are actively exploring various external avenues for supplementary funding.