Andrew Dickens: Our water infrastructure simply isn't getting better

Early Edition with Ryan Bridge

The Government’s new plan for water services is called Local Water Done Well. It’s all about keeping control in the hands of local councils and communities, rather than shifting everything to big centralised bodies.

Which was what Three Waters did. Eventually Labour caved and the policy got renamed 10 Waters because there would be 10 regionalised bodies, but even that was not popular. And of course there was the troublesome identity politics around Māori co-governance that freaked a lot of people out.

So now, Councils have to submit Water Services Delivery Plans showing how they’ll manage drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater safely, sustainably, and affordably.

There’s still strong oversight from regulators, but the focus is on local decision-making, community accountability, and better outcomes for everyone.

So Councils must submit their Water Services Delivery Plans (WSDPs) to the Secretary for Local Government and the deadline is the third of September. These plans outline how each council will deliver and fund water services - that’s tomorrow and it’s looking like it’s going to be a bust

And the big sticking point is funding, which was at the core of Three Waters. Three Waters was going to force water services to be amalgamated, the assets used to borrow against, and the loans paid off by water rates, not rates.

Local Water Done Well allows for that to happen too, but the difference is that it has to be done voluntarily by the councils, and they don’t want to do that.

Here’s a concrete example: Thames Coromandel is a nightmare water services situation. The area is mountainous and the weather events extreme. There’s hardly any ratepayers and the population expands immensely in the summer.

The Thames Coromandel Council wanted to join forces with Tauranga and Western Bays to form a bigger regional body to fund water off their existing assets.

Tauranga doesn’t want the hassle of Thames Coromandel and so the deal hasn’t happened. The estimation is that this will put 500 to 600 dollars onto the Thames Coromandel rates. We all want better water, but we all want lower rates.

We’ll find out tomorrow what’s going to happen with water but at the moment it looks like the policy should be renamed Local Water, done not very well and not funded.

After all the talk about water reform we’re right back at where we started from and you, the ratepayer, will have to pay for it.

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