ECan boss winds back admission of illegal irrigation
Environment Canterbury (ECan) chairperson Peter Scott says he regrets telling a radio show he was illegally irrigating part of his South Canterbury farm.
In the recent interview, Scott said two of his own consent applications had been delayed “for six years” by another government agency.
He told NewstalkZB that he was “carrying on, and I’m ignoring the fact that I haven’t got one, so I’m actually operating illegally and I’m the chairman of Environment Canterbury.”
He went on to advise others not to do the same, as ECan had a legal responsibility to check up on “people doing things they’re not supposed to” although he had sympathy for those who felt “pushed into those corners.”
When approached by The Press, Scott clarified his claims of illegality, stating he believed he had coverage under section 124 of the Resource Management Act. This can allow applicants to continue operating until a new consent is granted.
Scott hadn’t realised there would be an issue with this part of his farm until his own agency asked him if he had permission from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), who turned out to be the title holder.
Up until then, he believed the “small strip of land” had been added to his freehold title decades earlier.
“This piece of land, somehow, in that process has got missed out, and it still exists in its own title. So it's one of those funny, interesting, crazy things.”
He had since applied for a licence to occupy.
The situation underscored that some of the delays in consent processing were not related to ECan – “the frustration that people have with us is not only us causing that frustration,” Scott said.
An ECan spokesperson said the council had “already followed up on” the matter of Scott’s consents.
“Chair Scott has provided everything required for the processing of his consent applications. Sometimes consent applications can be delayed when information is required from third parties – as is the case here.”
However, ECan later clarified that Scott was in fact operating without the necessary farming land use consent.
“... As with many landowners, we are allowing these lawfully established activities to continue provided resource consent applications have been made.”
The regional council is defending its delays in processing consents, saying there have been significant improvements in recent months.
In a report presented to the council in March, senior strategy manager Emma Davis told councillors ECan did not expect to meet consent processing targets for 2023-2024.
The target requires 95% of consents to be processed within the RMA timeframe of 20 working days for non-notified resource consent applications. Councils that do not meet that deadline are required to discount fees at a rate of 1% for every working day an application remains unprocessed, up to a maximum of 50 working days.
The delays cost ECan almost $1 million in the second six months of 2023 alone. In October, councillors voted unanimously to inject $3.5 million from general rates reserves to speed up consenting to address “immediate performance risks”.
But consents planning manager Aurora Grant said things have improved since then. The the number of legacy or backlog consents (received before July 2023) being processed has been “consistently dropping over many months,” she said, and the council is now processing 72% of new consents within the legal time frame.
The wait for most applications to be allocated to a planner has also got better, dropping from eight weeks to an average of ten days, Grant added.
The council had employed 22 additional consent planners in the second half of last year.
The other target noted as “at risk” in its March report is the requirement to monitor at least 80% of priority consents.
About a third of 792 high priority consents had been monitored by ECan by the end of December, less than the 40% or more anticipated. But those figures had also improved, with 50% of high priority consents monitored by the end of March, and 68 more “in process,” Grant said.
Almost 30% of the high priority consents monitored were found to be moderately or significantly non-compliant.
“Following up and acting on known non-compliance of any consents takes priority over scheduled monitoring,” she said.