Scramble for water in Gore
As a crane lifted the concrete panels into place at a multimilliondollar factory, the Gore District Council was quietly scrambling.
It had signed an agreement to supply an infant milk formula plant with water but the well it was going to draw it from for the next 25 years suddenly wasn’t suitable.
News of the $240 million Mataura Valley Milk plant at McNab, 5km north of the town, was announced in July 2016. It is a significant development and has boosted the district’s economy.
The original plan was to take raw water from the council’s disused Oldham St well. It was Gore’s original well and developed in the 1900s. It had become an emergency supply until a lack of treatment meant it could not meet the New Zealand’s DrinkingWater Standards and it was withdrawn from the town supply.
In the council’s own words, the well water was ‘‘not fit for human consumption’’ and it was estimated $250,000 would have to be spent to upgrade it. The cost would be met by the council and recovered from Mataura Valley Milk via water supply charges.
The council spent $106,010 on site investigations, design and preliminary site works and a resource consent before work stopped in October 2017, just six months before the plant was expected to start testing in April 2018. It was not clear who made the call not to use the well.
Mataura Valley Milk general manager Bernard May told Stuff the council wanted to ‘‘keep the well for commercial use’’, yet council chief executive Steve Parry said Mataura Valley Milk didn’t want to use water from Oldham St because it was ‘‘a perception thing’’.
In response to an Official Information Act request asking why the Oldham St well was abandoned, the council replied: ‘‘The work was stopped because the Gore District Council saw an opportunity to secure an alternative site that was less restrictive than Oldham Street.’’
Questions still remain about the well but Parry, in an interview, was forthcoming about the situation the council was left in, when the well was mothballed.
‘‘We were scrambling a bit. We had this construction going on and all of a sudden no water for that plant.’’
In December 2017, the Eastern Southland Softball Association angrily posted on its Facebook page that its diamonds at the Gore A&P Showgrounds had been dug up, with no notification from the council.
At the time, Gore Mayor Tracy Hicks said his council ‘‘cocked up’’ by digging up land occupied by two softball diamonds without first telling the softball club of its plans.
He said the council had identified the land as a potential water source for the district, so drilled a test well, hole and trench.
Parry said at the time the digging was carried out, he didn’t know the softball association used that ground. ‘‘I just thought it was a paddock. And, when they found water there it was ‘Yes! Go and dig the damn thing up’.’’
The council spent $346,772.74 to construct the new bore at the showgrounds, including costs for finding the water source, infrastructure around it and resource consent costs.
Its resource consent application says the well is ‘‘to supply the Gore community including the support of new commercial and industrial development’’.
The council has consent to take up to 1080 cubic metres of water from the bore daily. Of that amount, the council has an agreement to supply a maximum of 700m3/day of untreated water to Mataura Valley Milk.
There have been grumblings in the community that the council put development ahead of residents who deal with water restrictions in summer.
The council has set up a water taskforce and is investigating the potential to incorporate the surplus water from the showgrounds well into the town supply. In the meantime, it has spent $235,000 to commission a new well to supply the town at Coopers Wells.
When asked if the council should have agreed to supply the plant when water was in such short supply in summer in Gore, Parry was philosophical.
‘‘Did we put the needs of industry above those of our ratepayers? Some will say we did, but when you have an industry that wants to spend $240 million and create 60 jobs knocking on your door, you make it work.’’