A Southland marae is set to purchase a council-owned building it occupies for $1 following a drawn-out process.

Located in Ohai — about an hour from Invercargill — Te Oruanui Marae makes use of a former rugby club building at the local recreation reserve.

A Southland Times article from March detailed the effort that had gone into re-establishing the marae after about a decade, with a goal of bringing people together.

But the new marae has faced difficulties gaining both a land lease and ownership of the building after its request unearthed complexities.

Those issues were explained in a recent council report, which said the rugby club rooms had been sold to a different entity, Te Oranui Incorporated (TOI), in 1994 with a land lease in place from late 1999.

The rolling land lease ended after TOI ceased to exist as a legal entity and was officially dissolved in 2021, leaving behind unpaid service charges of more than $9,300 for water and sewage.

New entity TOMOI began using the abandoned building without a lease and paid service charges from July 2023.

A request from council to the Wallace Takitimu Community Board for feedback in February was met with delays as the board took a closer look at the situation.

But then in June, TOMOI advised it would re-register TOI to settle its debts and restore its trustee role to the whenua through the Māori Land Court.

“Together, we can ensure that Te Oruanui Marae continues to stand as a taonga for our whānau and the wider Murihiku community for generations to come,” TOMOI chair Conrad Waihape wrote.

On Wednesday, the council resolved to transfer the building back to TOI for $1 dependent on the entity paying over $6500 in outstanding service charges.

The $1 transfer fee was deemed appropriate by the council for a number of reasons, including that the building had defaulted into council ownership at no cost, annual service charges going forward totaling more than $5,500 a year, and ongoing costs such as insurance, repairs, maintenance and electricity.

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air