Back of the Agenda – Sept 20-24

It was a monster week for the Nelson City Council despite it having only one scheduled meeting, with an eight-hour marathon taking councillors well into the evening.

A major item at the meeting was the council’s central library flood mitigation plan, which was approved at about 6pm on Thursday.

Councillor Rachel Sanson voted against the plan, over concerns that the council was not considering insurance retreat risk.

She referred to comments that insurance loss became a reality at 5 per cent annual exceedance probability (AEP), or a one-in-20-year occurrence, which was expected to start happening from about 2050 in Nelson.

Sanson said her request for council to assess the risk of insurance retreat for the project as part of its Long Term Plan was refused, and the council should now undertake the work to reassure the community.

Group manager of infrastructure Alec Louverdis said after the meeting that the council ‘‘does not speculate on how the insurance industry might respond to sea level rise and inundation events’’.

However, he said the council was aware of discussions about insurance retreat, and was ‘‘looking at this research and its outputs’’.

‘‘Insurance companies work with AEPs to decide what to charge for coverage and when to stop insuring a property . . . anecdotal evidence from the insurance industry that suggests partial insurance retreat begins to occur when the likelihood of an event reaches the 2 per cent AEP threshold, and full insurance retreat will have occurred by the time this reaches 5 per cent AEP.

‘‘New buildings designed to be above 1 per cent AEP flood levels at 2130, like the library, are not expected to be subject to insurance retreat over this time frame.’’

Louverdis said new buildings like the library would be designed to have a floor level higher than the expected levels of a 1 per cent AEP flood in 2130. Furthermore, the library would be built with the ability to raise floor levels in the future.

‘‘Should the Ministry for the Environment’s guidance to local government with respect to sea level rise change prior to or during the design process for the library building, the updated sea level rise figures will be incorporated into the design.’’

Most other issues have been covered in other stories this week, apart from a public submission by Nelson Residents Association member Steve Cross, who spoke about the Three Waters reform proposal.

Cross said he accepted that there was a need for change, but he did not agree with the model proposed by the Government.

He recommended a model based on the current supply of electricity in the country, which he said would achieve greater efficiencies than the proposed four-entity model would.

‘‘I accept the need for change, I accept the need for an independent regulator and water regulation, [but] the proposed model’s not the solution. The purported savings are fantastical and have been comprehensively discredited,’’ Cross said.

■ Back of the Agenda is a weekly roundup of goings-on at the Nelson City Council.