Central Coast Council announced on Monday evening that it terminated two contracts for the sale of Warnervale land to Australia China Theme Park Pty Ltd on July 19 for the project known as Chappypie.

It did not give reasons, but the decision comes after repeated extensions of time to the company to finalise the land sales.

The statement on Monday came more than three years after the Newcastle Herald revealed a Wyong Council announcement in 2014 of a $10 million ‘‘sale’’ of council-owned land for the theme park failed to note the council received just $100,000, and the terms of the contract allowed the company to walk away without further loss.

The council is believed to have received additional funds of up to $500,000 as a deposit under a revised contract in 2016.

Chappypie’s turbulent history includes a damning assessment by the NSW Department of Planning in 2015, strong criticism from large sections of the community, serious questions about transparency and council expenditure, and repeated internal criticism led by former Wyong councillor Bob Graham, who said Chappypie was just one of a number of “pie in the sky” projects by the former Wyong Council that cost the community many millions of dollars.

“As I said from day one, who in the bloody hell was going to travel from China to Australia to see plastic pandas at a theme park, and yet that’s what this was sold as,” said Mr Graham, 74, who announced last week that he was not going to stand for the new Central Coast Council in September.

“We’ve wasted all this time and money on something that was never going to happen, and yet when I tried to get support from government because all these decisions were being made in confidential, I got nowhere.

“As far as the community is concerned we’ve got nothing from a lot of proposals, but we’ve missed a lot of opportunities, we’ve wasted millions of dollars, and I’m concerned that if we don’t start the new council with fresh faces across the board we’ll just have the same problems.”

Mr Graham said the Chappypie theme park proposal topped a list of expensive proposals by the former council that caused serious concern both within, and outside, the Central Coast.

They included regional airport plans for Warnervale and Bushells Ridge that were criticised by Lake Macquarie Council and Newcastle Airport, regional university plans at Warnervale that were criticised by the University of Newcastle, and the sale of council land at Kangy Angy that left the small rural community with a rail maintenance facility to service the new Sydney to Newcastle Intercity trains.

“The council dealt with too many of these proposals in confidential council sessions so there was a real lack of transparency,” Mr Graham said.

“Sometimes the confidential business paper was thicker than the general business paper. You can find a reason to put a footpath extension into a confidential meeting, but that doesn’t mean to say you should do it.”

He said the Chappypie proposal should have ended in 2015 when the NSW Department of Planning rejected Wyong Council plans for a spot rezoning to change 15.7 hectares of industrial land at Warnervale to a tourist zone with a 50-metre height limit to accommodate the theme park.

The department agreed to limited changes that would leave the industrial zoning unchanged if the park did not go ahead.

The department challenged the council’s job projections, criticised the use of industrial land for a tourist project, and rejected plans to rezone environmental protection land to industrial to provide a bushfire buffer for the theme park.

‘‘The planning proposal estimates a potential 1000 jobs for the site, however there is no breakdown of what those jobs are, no estimate of visitor numbers, no assessments of how employees and visitors will travel to the site and no study of parking requirements,’’ a department planning team said.

‘‘Council was unable to provide any supporting evidence from the proponent for the job numbers or how many visitors the park would be likely to cater for.’’

The department questioned whether the 1000 jobs took into account the loss of up to 300 jobs from the rezoned industrial land.

‘‘Council has not provided sufficient justification for the proposed use of industrial land for the theme park,’’ the planning team said.

In its statement on Monday Central Coast Council said “other potential sale or uses of the land will be a decision of the future elected council”.