New freshwater rules ‘unaffordable’ for west coast: regional council president

More resource consents, more monitoring, more money and more staff: New government rules for freshwater management will cost the West Coast a lot, says regional council president Allan Birchfield.

Final freshwater policies and regulations came into effect last week and regional councils across the country must now enforce them.

Among them, the new wetland rules represented the biggest headache and expense for the West Coast, Birchfield said.

The West Coast Regional Council had spent more than 10 years mapping and defining important wetlands throughout the region, as required by the Government under the Resource Management Act.

READ MORE:
* Nature is being destroyed ‘at a rate unprecedented in history’, warns new report
* Parker, O’Connor up front on freshwater rules in Southland
* Farmers calculate costs of new freshwater regulations
* West Coast Council Reverses Decision on Wetlands

But now city councils are required to map all ‘natural inland wetlands’ larger than 500 square meters and “any others that are naturally smaller or known to contain threatened species.”

Birchfield said the cost to the city council and taxpayers, considering all the other new rules introduced by the government, would be prohibitive.

“We can’t do this. Our CEO calculated that it would cost $ 4 million just to implement the biodiversity policy; now, moreover, we can’t afford it. It’s terrible. We only take $ 2.3 million in fees in one year.”

Mapping all of the west coast wetlands would be problematic due to the large volume, council staff said in a report.

“Considering that mapping important and potentially important wetlands took almost a decade … this will require a significant amount of resources.”

Strict new regulations for farmers and other landowners would also put a heavy burden on the council, Birchfield said.

“We will have to hire more staff to handle all resource consents and monitoring and reporting – in my opinion, we are set to fail, so that the government can step in and take over, just as they are doing with the Three waters. We might as well be in North Korea with state farms. “

Among the new rules to protect fresh water:

• All cattle, deer and pigs in the new grazing systems should be excluded from wetlands, a rule that overrides the existing allowable activity rules for livestock grazing and will apply to additional wetlands that are currently not defined as such for the advice.
• Resource consents will be required for all feedlots – the council estimates that 300 separation pads on Coast farms will not comply with the new rules and farmers will have to stop using them or obtain resource consents by July 1, 2021.
• Intensive winter grazing that does not meet allowable activity standards will also need resource consent. The standards include land with an average slope of 10 percent; excavation less than 8 inches deep in no more than 50 percent of the paddock and a deadline of October 1 of each year to replant the area.

Council staff say measuring and monitoring those standards will be difficult, if not impossible, and that the October deadline will be unattainable in a rainy spring season on the coast.

Farmers will also need resource authorizations if they want to apply more than 190 kilograms of nitrogen fertilizer per hectare per year and provide receipts and reports to the town hall to demonstrate their consumption.

The limit is likely to require substantial changes for many dairy farmers, council staff warned.

“They will have to reduce stocks. And that means lower productivity, less money and a downturn in the economy at a time when you need all the help you can get,” Birchfield said.

Former Federated Farmers national president Katie Milne, who grows in Rotomanu near Lake Brunner, said the new rules were highly prescriptive and the government appeared to have ignored most of the comments from West Coast farmers.

“We already have good rules and the best freshwater quality in New Zealand, but they have created a one-size-fits-all regime that does not recognize the differences between the west coast and the rest of the country. Being hugely expensive for a minimal profit.”

The rules for the fighting areas were a good example, Milne said.

“We can get 4m of rain a year here, and the idea of ​​a showdown is to protect the whole farm from drilling and then repair the little damaged area after winter.”

Farmers who do not comply with the new and demanding pugging rules could face criminal convictions, he said.

“This is draconian … it is taking regulation to a whole new level and some parts of the package are just unworkable. People will need multiple resource permits to farm, and the expense for farmers and councils will be enormous.”

City councils and farmers had been working closely together for the past 10 years with good results for freshwater, but the heavy-handed regulation now being imposed on them would jeopardize the goodwill that had built up during that time, he said. Milne.

The regional council’s science and planning manager, Hadley Mills, said the council had strongly opposed some of the proposed freshwater rules and expected more relief.

“We have had something: collecting sphagnum moss is a permitted activity on existing sites, and it will need resource consent for new ones … that’s what we asked for and got it, partly because we had guys from the Ministry of the Environment down here and showed them the moss sites. “

But the expected relief for the wetlands regime had not come, Mills said.

The Greymouth-based council would need at least two more people on its science team to deal with the new rules, and the council was still analyzing the resources it would need to deal with consents, monitor compliance, and map the hundreds of undocumented wetlands in the West Coast.

“That is the one that worries me the most … if you look at the cost and the anguish we had for the important and potential wetlands … this is worse.”