‘Bandaid’ approach to river spills
The chairperson of Waikato-Tainui’s executive has taken at swipe at the city council after an incident at its Pukete wastewater treatment plant.
Tukoroirangi Morgan says the plant and other issues will be raised formally with the council at a meeting in May.
He was commenting after a “critical” pipeline, taking treated wastewater from the plant to the Waikato River, was damaged last month.
The city has said there were no unauthorised spills of treated wastewater to the river after the incident and it was “very unlikely” any would happen while pipeline repairs are completed.
Both Waikato-Tainui and the regional council, which has a regulatory role in environmental matters, had been informed.
In a statement on Tuesday the regional council said: “From our monitoring of the remediation and information received from [Hamilton city] we would believe at this stage that the risk of any wastewater spill would be low.”
But, responding to queries from the Waikato Times, Morgan said he was concerned about wastewater management.
“These kinds of incidents are becoming increasingly common and the [city council] band aid approach is unacceptable.”
The iwi received weekly incident notifications about spills from Hamilton’s wastewater network, a Waikato-Tainui spokesperson said.
“This would not happen if the investment in water infrastructure was maintained and upgraded to meet the strategic intent of consecutive long term plans,” Morgan said in a statement.
When he and the late Lady Raiha Mahuta negotiated the iwi’s river settlement with the Crown they advocated for the establishment of the Waikato River Authority “to keep our river clean”.
“It cannot do this if councils continue to use the environment as default dumping ground for bad decision-making.”
The “ongoing environmental breaches” have been added as an item of “critical importance” when the iwi meets with the Hamilton council over their river joint management agreement in May, Morgan said.
“We remind all partner councils of their obligations under Te Ture Whaimana [the Vision and Strategy for the river] in all our engagements.
“And we continue to be concerned about the impacts of these incidents on our awa and surrounding environment.”
The latest pipeline mishap caused an as yet unquantified amount of damage, the council said on Monday.