Legal battle over aquaculture space
The largest salmon company in New Zealand is going to court in an attempt to quash a mussel farm extension muscling in on a site identified by the Government as a possible space for salmon farming.
New Zealand King Salmon has filed for a judicial review challenging a Marlborough District Council decision to accept a resource consent application from a rival marine farming company, Marlborough Aquaculture.
The scene of the showdown is Blowhole Point, in the outer Pelorus Sound. Marlborough Aquaculture already has an existing mussel farm in the area, and is seeking consent to expand.
However, the farm overlaps slightly with one of six sites identified by the Ministry for Primary Industries as suitable for relocating low-flow King Salmon farms in the Marlborough Sounds.
If consent was granted, the roughly 10-hectare extension would effectively cover the proposed salmon farm. So, King Salmon filed their own resource consent application to use the space in January.
The company applied to create a 7.5-hectare mussel farm in the area. They then sought a judicial review challenging the legitimacy of the Marlborough Aquaculture application in a bid to get it deemed incomplete.
The case, which is set to be heard in the High Court in Blenheim on August 30, hinges on a survey Marlborough Aquaculture included in its resource consent application last October.
NZ King Salmon is arguing that the council should never have accepted the application, because a benthic survey – part of an assessment of environmental effects – was done for the existing mussel farm, not the proposed extension.
But Marlborough Aquaculture director David Clark said the company supplied enough material for a reasonable assessment to be made, and once the council accepted the application and requested more information, they complied.
Clark, an environmental lawyer, said he had never encountered a judicial review on whether a council should accept an application as complete.