Backer awaits dam consents: HBRC

Hawke's Bay Regional Council chairman Fenton Wilson addressing yesterday's meeting of Napier and Districts Grey Power at Tamatea Community Church. Photo / Paul Taylor

A potential corporate investor is lined up to undertake due diligence once resource consent issues related to the Ruataniwha dam are finalised, Hawke's Bay Regional Council's chairman says.

Fenton Wilson told a Grey Power meeting in Napier yesterday that the farming community in Central Hawke's Bay "aren't ready to sign up en masse" to the take water from the irrigation scheme until a board of inquiry finishes re-working consents for an associated environmental plan change.

"Some have and some are poised ready to go but they want to understand how that [plan change] would work," he said.

"There is still an investor that is sitting there ready to look at it more closely when they understand what the consents look like."

The board of inquiry granted consents to the dam last year but its decision over the related plan change for the Tukituki catchment, known as Plan Change 6, was challenged in the High Court.

The court directed the board to rewrite part of the plan change and it is currently working through a process to consider submissions on how it should be reworded.

"The dam has all its consents.

"The dam could start tomorrow but we don't have clarity for the farming community about how they will operate within the plan change," Mr Wilson told yesterday's meeting.

Asked if the council's part-funding of the scheme would push up rates, Mr Wilson said: "The returns projected on that are 6 per cent and it is envisaged that if it gets up and running it will actually help rates."

Grey Power members at the meeting also asked if the regional council was making money by selling aquifer water for bottling. Work is under way at Awatoto on a bottling plant commissioned by a company with consent to take more than 400 million litres of water from a bore on the site.

"I wish we were selling water to China. That would offset the rates even further," Mr Wilson said.

He said water bottlers, like any other extractors such as orchards, had to meet a range of conditions that were agreed with the regional council before consents were granted.

"They've got to have a use very clearly laid out, and volumes very clearly laid out. The impact on the aquifer is paramount to any of these negotiations."

Mr Wilson was also asked if the council was planning to sell its prime asset, Napier Port.

The idea had been "kicked around for years," he said, but "it's not for sale".