Waste plant

Paul Taylor from South Island Resource Recovery Ltd has called the second rejection by both Environment Canterbury and the Waimate District Council of his company’s resource consent application to build a waste to energy plant ‘‘unlawful and an abuse of power’’. If all else fails, bring in the lawyers.

Taylor claims the Resource Management Act had no requirements for a Cultural Impact Assessment to be provided as a prerequisite to making a legally competent application. Surely with all of the ‘‘expert ‘‘ consultants SIRRL is paying, and after earlier discussions with ECan, they must have been aware that a site specific Cultural Impact Assessment was an important requirement.

His comments on the inadequate CIA that they did submit are offensive to both the runanga and to the wider community. It would also be interesting to know what Taylor means by ‘‘providing help with further resourcing’’ for the runanga.

Now is the time for him to come clean and admit the real reason behind SIRRL’s posturing: They are desperate to have their application date stamped before December 1, when changes to the Resource Management Act which enable ECan to evaluate greenhouse gas emissions in consent applications comes into force.

They know that their greenhouse gas modelling is flawed and will not stand up to scrutiny.

By the way, we are still waiting for the community consultation that Taylor has been promising for the last two years.

Peter Vendetti

Waimate

Paul Taylor replied: These are the facts. Firstly, SIRRL absolutely supports the importance and requirement for Cultural Impact Assessment (CIA) and has made this clear on a number of occasions, most importantly to the local iwi to which we continue to work with on the CIA.

Secondly, the councils were clear that in their view a CIA was the only outstanding document preventing acceptance of the whole application for processing to begin. However, it is an accepted process and quite normal that a CIA can be completed once all these documents are available and is then provided. This is why SIRRL are perplexed, as are others including RMA experts. This is why the company had lodged the objection.

Meanwhile, previously our return to Waimate to discuss Project Kea awaited this application’s acceptance by the councils for processing. However, the correspondent will be pleased to know, SIRRL will now be returning very soon to the region to talk more with the community about the project. This will include providing more details on the application’s expert reports, including the GHG information the writer mentions below.