Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Talks resume over troubled waters
Discussions between the Kaiko¯ ura District Council and members of the East Coast Community Water Scheme are back on track after a months-long stand-off over council charges.
The scheme members – mainly farmers – were reluctant to talk to the council about its proposals to chlorinate the water in line with new government drinking water regulations, while a row over council ‘‘overheads’’ charged to the scheme was unresolved.
Members maintain it costs the council about $3000 to administer the scheme, which they manage themselves – and protested last year when they discovered the council had charged them significantly more than this in the past two years.
They calculated they had been overcharged by $25,000. While the past charges remain unresolved, the bill has come down to $7000 for the current year and beyond, and the two sides are now talking to each other again.
But resolving the water treatment issue is still some way off. The council has to upgrade water supplies to meet drinking water standards and has had a grant of nearly $1.7 million from the Government to do the job.
Of that, $168,000 is tagged for the East Coast scheme. The challenge with the scheme is that it was built to supply stock water to 21 farms – but it also services 13 households in Clarence village.
The farmers say the bore water is pure and paying for chlorination mainly to water their stock would be a pointless expense. They also argue there would be no residual chlorine in the pipes anyway by the time the water reaches the end of the 40-kilometre line.
Council staff have been investigating the possibility of splitting the scheme, so that water going to the village is treated and stock water is not. Farm households would then have to find other drinking water sources or treatments at their own expense, to comply with the regulations.
The secretary of the East Coast Community Organisation, Chris
Wilson, said the scheme users and the council were now communicating about possible compromises. One potential solution was for Clarence village to join the Kaiko¯ ura water cohort – made up of other drinking water schemes in the district, to spread operating and compliance costs.
The council’s operations manager, Dave Clibbery, was preparing a paper on the various options, Wilson said.
Although the East Coast water supply has never been known to cause illness, the Ministry of Health considers no bores safe after the 2016 Havelock North bore contamination in which 5000 people became ill and four died.