Councillor claims threat to poison trees

A West Coast Regional Council member says some people whose land has been designated wetland have threatened to poison trees if they are not compensated by the Government.

After an eight-year Environment Court process, about 6000 hectares of private land on the Coast have been defined as schedule 2 wetland in the council’s Land and Water Plan. The designation means landowners will need an ecologist’s report and resource consent to modify the land and some uses could be prohibited.

Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage has said there are no plans to compensate the landowners and some councillors, including Peter Ewen, have denounced the process as a land grab.

Ewen told a council meeting last week there would be consequences for conservation if the Government continued to refuse to address the compensation issue.

‘‘I have heard from the representative of a Westland group . . . if there’s no compensation, you watch over time: big trees on scenic reserves, big trees that are photo opportunities, they’ll change colour pretty quickly.

‘‘They will try to poison them, and said ‘no bugger’s going to see us’. I don’t condone that but I can understand why the threat might be made.’’

The council last week voted not to accept the recommendations of the hearing commissioner to take 500ha of private land off schedule 2 because inspection had proved they did not meet the wetlands criteria.

The plan change would also have made sphagnum moss picking a permitted activity under certain conditions, ending years of uncertainty for the export industry. But five of the nine members of the council’s resource management committee voted against it.

Council chairman Alan Birchfield said there were still large areas on maps accepted by the Environment Court that were not wetlands and had still not been properly assessed.

‘‘They’re taking out 500ha but there were 6000ha on the schedule and the boundaries haven’t been done properly, huge areas in Westland that haven’t been looked at,’’ he said.

‘‘In my heart, I can’t accept anything that’s not correct . ... We should be either all in or all out.’’