Asking the Northern Regional Council to refuse to allow the Whangarei District Council to discharge higher volumes of treated wastewater from its Kioreroa Rd plant could appear ridiculous at first glance.
It’s not.
That treated water to be discharged during a storm will be filtered only; the bug count will remain high and the harbour is just as likely to be closed if it is discharged at Okara Park or at the treatment works into Limeburner’s Creek.
Currently the District Council has consent which requires the pipe network to receive no more stormwater than 5 times the dry weather flows of wastewater.
This consent condition required the District Council to maintain its sewerage system so the flows did not increase.
The system wasn’t maintained sufficiently and those flows are now up to 10 times the dry weather flows.
Refusing to increase permitted inflows means the District Council would have to put more emphasis on maintenance and monitoring to ensure that stormwater doesn’t get in to the sewerage system.
There were some 44 recorded sewage over flows last year and all were investigated.
Individually each could be explained and was accidental - taken all together though it’s obvious something is wrong.
The Regional Council has a legal responsibility to keep the harbour clean and it could prosecute the District Council just as it would prosecute a dairy farmer pumping effluent into a stream.
However, issuing fines is counter intuitive - ratepayers paying to prosecute themselves is nonsensical. Issuing an abatement notice however, may be more productive in ensuing WDC addresses the problem. (WDC itself issues abatement notices to people with faulty gulley traps.) Currently the District Council is planning to spend $10million and more to treat up to 120,000 cubic metres of sewage/stormwater that can go through the system on a single stormy day. (Normal dry weather flows are around 11,000 cubic metres.)
That means we’re spending millions of dollars to treat occasional stormwater that should never be in the system in the first place.
By using abatement notices and refusing to permit an increase in discharge levels the Regional Council can force the District Council to focus on preventing stormwater inflows rather than focus on building expensive capacity to deal with the occasional storm event.
(Remember, preventing overflows at Okara Park pump does not address the multitude of overflow points scattered throughout the network.)