The Teviot community will be invited to a public meeting on the future of its cinema rebuild in early April, where a stakeholder group will be formed.

Central Otago District Council property and facilities manager Garreth Robinson gave the Teviot Community Board a presentation on the next steps at a workshop on Thursday.

Garreth has been involved with the Cromwell Memorial Hall development and has extensive knowledge of the process involved in new builds.

Acknowledging that February 6 was a very sad day for the Teviot community, Garreth said the fire was very destructive and left behind “absolute devastation.”

He said surprisingly they managed to save some of cash in the till and some chocolate bars “which we should probably auction off and make a fortune.”

Board chair Norm Dalley said it was a huge learning curve for everyone and the level of devastation was not something the community has had to recover from before.

The historic building was opened in 1875 and divested to the council in 1918. The site had now been cleared and was free of asbestos - so far the demolition costs and clean up was only $221,000 rather than the $435,000 budgeted.

Because it was an historic site, the council was liasing with Heritage New Zealand for archeological authority to continue site works. That report would take 40 days.

Norm said there was a stockpile of bricks left from the building that were planned to be sold and used either in the rebuild or as landscaping onsite.

The building was insured for $6.4 million and the council would go out to market with potential suppliers for ideas on a new community space and theatre.

Garreth said the Cromwell Memorial Hall featured a 40-seater bespoke cinema so one idea was to use the engineered drawings and costs from that to make it more straightforward.

Those at the workshop were shown other ideas such as $5 million Luggate Memorial Hall - the Southern Hemisphere’s first ‘Passiv Build.

A question from the board was why they couldn’t go out to the community first and ask them what they wanted, before going to market.

Garreth said there were limitations with what they could build with the insurance money, and Norm suggested forming a group with 6-10 representatives to act on behalf of the community.

It was agreed a community meeting in the evening around April 8-9 when the Long Term Plan consultation meetings began would be appropriate - to form the stakeholder group.

In the meantime, council would also be bringing back a paper with some options to the next community board meeting.