Taupō District Council communications staff and the councillors themselves feel they will have a major job getting cut-through with the public before a council decision on Local Water Done Well (LWDW) in June/July.
It is likely that the TDC will present three options during a consultation phase this month and next on how water (stormwater, wastewater and drinking water) should be managed in the district in future.
The mandated impetus for the change from the status quo comes as LWDW replaces the previous government’s torpedoed attempt at water system reform, the much maligned Three Waters.
At a council workshop on Thursday (April 3) councillors heard presentations from the Department of Internal Affairs with the department's chief technical officer Marlon Bridge confirming the relatively secure position the TDC is in regarding the reforms, as well as from their own staff on the financial implications of joining other Waikato councils or pursuing an inhouse solution – the preferred council staff option following a survey, said the council’s LWDW programme manager Jo Walton.
The April 3 workshop followed a previous discussion which included a presentation on the Waikato Waters Done Well option.
A fair amount of discussion however focussed on how to appraise the public of the pros and cons of the different options, the process councillors themselves will have been through before settling on the preferred option and alternatives – to be decided on April 15 – and how to concisely present this data and projections that have informed council thinking. This discussion came about not least because some of the financial modelling between the options is not yet granular enough to allow councillors to be “comparing apples with apples” as meeting chair deputy mayor Kevin Taylor commented, and the highly complex nature of projecting future benefits or costs in amalgamating or going it alone.
More councillor workshops may yet come before April 15.
At the moment the choices to be presented publicly look likely to be: joining with a number of other Waikato councils as part of Waikato Water Done Well – though Taupō may seek to do this in a staged manner if the council can negotiate a delayed entry to that council-controlled organisation (CCO), an in-house option which will more closely resemble what happens at the moment but still with the required financial separation from the rest of the council’s business and a third option Taupō CCO, likely to be a variant of the inhouse one, but with a different governance structure.
A series of tight timelines have been set by central government for all councils to make LWDW decisions, compounded by this being a local body election year in which councils by convention try to avoid making major decisions in the three months prior to the October vote. The issue is also complicated for the TDC by the desire for Waikato Water Done Well* to have an indication by June on whether the TDC is going to be in or out.
The public consultation is not binding but will inform a formal council decision on one of the options – projected to happen in July/August, in time for the central government requirement that the council submit its Water Services Delivery Plan by September 3.
*The other WWDW district councils are: Hauraki, Matamata-Piako, Otorohanga, South Waikato, Waipa and Waitomo.
