Faster track

They wanted to separate glass so they didn’t have to change processes at the resource centre, he said.

Councillor Cynthia Brooks said the ‘‘cry’’ for wheelie bins, had been ‘‘loud and long’’ and expected the community would welcome the proposal.

However, she worried there might be some residents who missed out, based on the collection boundaries, and asked if there was some ‘‘wriggle room’’.

Councillor Jamie Arbuckle agreed, and told council staff not to ‘‘underestimate’’ what Brooks said. But he was ‘‘excited’’ about the proposal.

Mcneil said houses not in townships, say between Renwick and Havelock, might be able to sign up for the service by contacting the contractor directly.

‘‘That might be one of the things that comes out of the consultation.’’

He thought there might be pockets of homes that were big enough to justify being included in the scheme too.

The committee moved to consult on the proposal throughout November this year. Feedback would be reported back to full council through the 2023-24 Annual Plan process. If the bins were adopted, the contract would start on July 1, 2024.

Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air.

Just before the storm ripped through Marlborough last week, emergency works on the Wairau River were rushed through.

It held, thankfully, but Tuesday’s rain had nothing on last year’s July flood event, which damaged 460 kilometres of road — that’s Blenheim to Timaru.

It had become the second-largest local road recovery project in New Zealand, after the Christchurch Earthquakes.

Marlborough Roads manager

Steve Murrin said the scale of damage from last year’s event was ‘‘unprecedented’’.

So far, ‘‘160,000 hours’’ had been spent repairing Marlborough’s roads, Murrin said.

All roads made unpassable by the storm were now open to at least controlled access, and ‘‘80% of the 1600 faults have been repaired’’, he said.

Council rivers engineer Geoff Dick presented an update to councillors on Thursday on the Wairau River flood recovery and said all emergency repairs, stop banks and damaged flood gates had been repaired.

‘‘We are reasonably comfortable we are on track with the repair schedule that was approved last November, and we are working around constraints we’ve had with the quarries,’’ Dick said.

He said he was yet to calculate the total cost of the work – estimated to cost $11.2m in November last year.

‘‘My gut instinct is that we’re probably a little bit over the estimates that we provided, and once that’s done, we will make our claim to insurers,’’ he said.

He said prior to Tuesday’s storm, he ‘‘expedited’’ two jobs along the Wairau River.

‘‘Typically what happens after a flood like