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Be prepared for water change ‘one way or another’ – mayor

Three Waters Skara Bohny skara.bohny@stuff.co.nz

‘‘Climate change is going to mean we’re dealing with a very different scenario when it comes to our Three Waters infrastructure.’’

Nelson mayor Rachel Reese

Nelson City Council is far from convinced on the Government’s proposed Three Waters reforms, but the mayor is warning people to be braced for change ‘‘one way or another’’.

The Government’s proposal is for the management of stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water, the ‘‘three waters’’ services currently supplied by 67 councils around the country, to instead be provided by four new ‘‘entities’’.

It is also proposing a new water services regulator, Taumata Arowai, take over the role currently occupied by District Health Boards.

At a full council meeting on Thursday the council agreed to send a letter of feedback to the Government on its proposed reforms.

It outlined several pages of ‘‘questions and issues’’, including concerns about the entities’ governance structure, which the council’s letter said was ‘‘too convoluted, with councils too far removed’’.

The current proposed structure is a model in which a board made up of half local authority and half local iwi appoint representatives to a regional group, which appoints an independent selection panel, which in turn appoints an ‘‘entity board’’ which governs ‘‘entity management’’.

Deputy Mayor Judene Edgar raised a concern she had heard from the public about supposed ‘‘iwi veto’’ built into the proposal, which chief executive Pat Dougherty said was not apparent from the proposal itself.

He said that the regional representative group, made up of half council and half iwi, would have ‘‘some decisionmaking process’’, but said he had not seen ‘‘anything that would suggest there was a veto there’’.

‘‘We don’t know how decision-making would be made in those boards, it’s very hard to leap to the conclusion that there’s going to be veto.’’

The council’s letter included a question to the Government on how iwi involvement in the regional representative group would be determined.

Dougherty also addressed community concerns at the potential future privatisation of the three waters assets, saying that there was a ‘‘very, very high bar to cross’’ for future Governments which wanted to sell, with the caveat that Governments could theoretically change legislation if it wanted.

He believed the current proposal was for any sale to require 75 per cent support from both the regional representative group and 75 per cent support from customers.

‘‘Another reason that iwi are

[involved], apart from the Government recognising its Treaty obligations for co-governance, [is] having iwi sitting on that regional report group – it would be a very brave Government some time in the future that would go to iwi and say ‘ we think we should privatise these assets’,’’ he said.

‘‘So the structure that is there at the moment is very strong, but I think the fact that we’ve mentioned [privatisation] in our letter and our addendum makes it very clear that it is an area of concern to us and of concern to a lot of councils around the country.’’

The Three Waters reforms have proved highly contentious in Nelson, with opponents to the proposal storming the council building the morning of the decision.

Councillor Tim Skinner said the public had made it ‘‘very clear’’ to him that they did not want Nelson to continue in the process.

‘‘There’s no-one, literally no-one who’s got an appetite for us to go into this nationalising, of handing over our waters to an entity which has no skin in the game, based in Wellington or

Hawke’s Bay,’’ he said. ‘‘We could and should be making it very clear that we are not convinced that the proposed model for four large entities is beneficial, nor do we support that for the country – and certainly I don’t support that for this city.’’

He said while some may be thinking at a national level, councillors should be focused on the ‘‘wellbeing and the interests of the community and financial wellbeing of Nelson’’.

The proposal as it stood left Nelson the ‘‘second-least benefited’’, he said.

Mayor Rachel Reese said it was understandable for there to be some ‘‘fear of change’’ in the community, although she said some of that had been ‘‘driven by misinformation’’.

However, she said the community needed to be prepared for change regardless of the council’s ultimate decision on the Three Waters reform.

‘‘I am really clear that things are changing. Things are changing. Climate change is going to mean we’re dealing with a very different scenario when it comes to our Three Waters infrastructure.

‘‘Change is also coming through Taumata Arawai, the economic regulator, and that regulator is going to be setting the standards across all of those things [Three Waters services] and it’s not going to be optional, it’s not going to be a scenario where you can say well actually I’m not going to comply,’’ she said. ‘‘At the moment there are no consistent standards across New Zealand. We do have people getting sick every year from drinking water, we do have wastewater discharges that don’t meet what we consider best practice environmental standards, and in our case in Nelson we have a very rudimentary stormwater system that we need to address.’’

She said that some people calling for the council to hold onto its three waters assets were ‘‘the same people who say I don’t want higher rates’’.

‘‘Well guess what – you want to keep the three waters? It’s just going to get higher and higher and higher, along with the debt level that also wasn’t supported,’’ she said. ‘‘You’re sort of stuck, because change is going to have to happen one way or another.’’

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2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/281621013483061

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