The Whangarei District Council will spend $34 million on the next stage of improving its wastewater system to prevent sewage leaks into Whangarei Harbour. At its Infrastructure and Services Committee meeting yesterday, councillors voted to spend the money from 2013 to 2019. The council already planned to spend about $16 millionon upgrading its system over the next few years, meaning a total spend on the ageing system of $50 million, committee chairman Crichton Christie said. He said the spend-up was one of the most important items for the council to consider. "I'm very pleased this item got on the table. People thought we don't take sewage seriously ... we take it very seriously," he said. "This is $50 million we are talking about and that's a large sum of money. A lot of people are saying just fix it [leaking sewerage system] but if that was that easy we would have done it years ago. It's not easy." The first stage was to upgrade the Okara Park pump station to stop wet weather overflows and increase the capacity of the wastewater treatment plant so the larger flows from Okara Park could be screened and primary treated. This project is near completion. The second stage, from 2013, includes the long-term engineering options to reduce spillage from the network and a capital works programme, including a new large pump station to the treatment plant; upgrading of the treatment plant; and increasing capacity of key sewers. It also includes high-tech storm flow treatment at its treatment plant in Kioreroa Rd and storage, with future storm flow treatment at the Hatea pump station. Council water services manager Simon Weston said the strategy had been driven by a number of factors. These included submissions on the WDC's recent resource consent application to increase the volume of primary treated effluent discharge from the treatment plant during storms, the availability of the recent completed sewer network model which has allowed a quantitative assessment of the sewer systems performance during storms and therefore a prioritisation and analysis of upgrade work, and the outcome of the Niwa model that demonstrates, because of tidal
action, how discharges move through the harbour. All councillors present voted for the expenditure, except Brian Mclachlan, who said it was the "ambulance at the bottom of the cliff" and the council should try to stop excess stormwater getting into the system.
