Palmerston North's Stefan Speller: Nature Calls project progresses

Palmerston North City Council has decided its wastewater treatment plant will be upgraded. Photo / Supplied

OPINION:

Next week Palmerston North City Council will decide how to progress its Nature Calls project.

On August 25, the council was presented a wide range of technical reports to consider following the three-year project. Council officers made a technical recommendation of a dual river and land discharge.

That recommendation will be discussed in more detail on September 8 and council will make a decision how to proceed.

This gradual land discharge will require the purchase of a substantial amount of land, up to 2000 hectares. This option has been estimated to cost $496 million, well over the $350m budgeted in the recently adopted 10-Year Plan.

One of the biggest unknown players in this project is the Three Waters reforms. The council still has to decide whether it will hand over its wastewater assets and management to the new regional entity due to be in place by July 2024. It looks likely the council will make this move but there are several councils that are choosing to retain their assets, including Whangārei and Far North district councils.

Palmerston North City Council consulted the community on this project for some time, initially with several options including discharge to the ocean. The current move is a hybrid of these earlier options. I attended several of the council's engagement meetings, which were very poorly attended by the community.

The council gave the public feedback a weighting of just 5 per cent in its nearly 900-page final determination document as it felt this feedback was not representative of community opinion.

There has however been vocal comment and submissions from farmers about the land that may be needed and may indeed be obtained through the Public Works Act. Water and environmental care advocates have also raised concern about the impact the discharged wastewater will have on both river and land.

A point I feel has not been raised well in the public discussion is that with the suggested changes, our water treatment plant will move to provide the highest quality of water treatment of any facility currently operating in New Zealand. Concerns were raised nearly 10 years ago by Horizons Regional Council that the city council's discharge was harming life in the Manawatū River.

We still have to consider when and where the discharge takes place as both have impacts on aquatic life and soil quality, but this improvement in wastewater treatment quality means we will be moving towards a better option for our environment.

Another point is that, simply put, a change is absolutely necessary. The council is legally required to have a new resource consent in place with Horizons Regional Council by June 2022. It is also true that even with this substantial cost, councils cannot afford to neglect infrastructure spending – as councils such as Wellington have recently demonstrated.

As this project comes at the cost of $496m, $146m over the amount budgeted in April 2021, the main concern will simply be how the funding is obtained.

The council cannot extend itself this far on credit alone, which would place it in breach of the New Zealand Local Government Funding Agency rules on debt limits. With more details of the Three Waters reforms to follow, the council will likely be looking for an option to hand this significant cost to central government as soon as possible.

• Stefan Speller is a governance board chairman, central government public servant, and candidate in the February 2021 Palmerston North City Council by-election.

The start of this opinion piece has been updated to better reflect council's decision making to date.