Paekākāriki surf club still short $250k for new building fit‑out

Monday, 26 January 2026

From the outside, Paekākāriki Surf Lifesaving Club’s new two-storey clubroom at Queen Elizabeth Park looks like it’s up and running — the club even hosted the lifesaving regional championships a few weeks ago.

But inside, it’s still a work in progress. The second-floor area set aside for functions was clearly still a construction site as builders continued to work on it and timber sprawled across the floor on the day that Local Democracy Reporting paid a visit.

And the club still needs $250,000 for items such as flooring, light fittings, bathrooms and a lift.

Club chairperson Matt Warren said the new function room, which would be available for public hire, was “really important” for the club’s future.

“It’s a bit of revenue so we can help manage the costs over time,” he said. “The more we get the community involved in the club, the more membership we get, the more support we get.”

Karen Simpson-Warren, the club’s secretary and chairperson of its clubrooms fundraising committee, added the function room meant local residents could also use the building.

“We never wanted it just to be a club that sat here, doing nothing,” she said. “We want the community to be able to use it when we don’t need it for our essential services.”

The club has already spent $5.1 million on the project, which has been 15 years in the making and replaces its previous 1960s‑era building located 85 metres away. The old clubroom was demolished in 2023 due to its poor condition.

Without a base, the club’s lifeguards had been patrolling Paekākāriki Beach out of a shipping container over the past few summers.

The Kāpiti Coast District Council provided $1.1m – $100,000 of rates across two grants and $1m of its Crown funding allocation from the Three Waters reform support package. Other funding, donations and sponsors from local businesses covered the rest.

The new clubroom also has a watch-tower, storage area, patrol management area and fitted-out resuscitation room.

The club had already run pub quizzes, weekly barbecues and charity comedy nights to chip the amount down. “Every little bit helps,” Warren said.

The club’s members also rolled up their sleeves to keep costs down: the concrete pad at the back of the building ended up costing half the original estimate because working bees built the formwork before the concrete was poured.

As construction costs continued to rise – with fire protection systems and electrical work alone raking up bills in the hundreds of thousands – Warren said it was best to get the new clubroom finished as quickly as possible.

“If we left it another five years, I would say we would probably be closer to $10 million.”

Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air