But Aujla said it doesn’t feel fair.
The new infrastructure won’t even stop her property flooding, she said, because the stream is part of an overloaded stormwater system, especially since an extra 400 homes have just been built upstream and are causing more runoff.
“All the water getting into that stream is all stormwater - it floods all the time,” Aujla said.
“I could probably clean my section, but I don’t know if my neighbour is gonna clean [theirs], and then with a backlog of not having a clean stream, it will flood anyway.”
Managing and modernising Auckland’s stormwater infrastructure is one of the key challenges - potentially costing billions of dollars - to have emerged from reviews of this year’s devastating floods.
Blocked streams and poorly designed infrastructure, such as bridges that collect debris and block water flow, exacerbated the “catastrophic floods that affected thousands of people, including about 1000 in my electorate alone”, Te Atatū Member of Parliament Phil Twyford said.
One bridge in West Auckland, for example, did not have sufficient space for water to flow under it, causing three neighbourhoods to flood, he said.
Yet Auckland Council only accepts responsibility to fix and maintain about half the streams.
That’s because Auckland’s urban area has an estimated 3000km of streams, with “nearly all of them” being part of the stormwater system, Twyford said.
Yet about 50 per cent run on or next to private property.
Twyford said his constituents tell him that after heavy rain events, trees, branches and other debris can wash down from upstream and become stuck next to their properties.
“They will ring the council and say, ‘I’m worried that if we have another heavy rain event, [the stream is] going to flood and we’ll face the same disaster again,” Twyford said.
“And council basically says to them, ‘the stream runs next to your property. Therefore, under our bylaw, you’re responsible for maintaining it.’”
This piecemeal system relying on a patchwork of owners to fund expensive stream maintenance not only lacks a “strategic” approach to managing the whole stormwater system, Twyford said. It can also create “ridiculous” situations.
That includes small homeowners, who simply live next to a stream, being required to hire earthmoving equipment and spend tens of thousands of dollars to unblock it, only for another owner upstream to not do their part and cause a flood anyway, he said.
It can also mean debris that forms in a public part of a stream and then washes down, 5m past the public land’s border into waters next to private homeowners, can then become their financial problem to fix, he said.
However, the Government’s Affordable Water Reforms, formerly known as Three Waters, will begin to tackle the problem, Twyford said.
Although the broader reforms are opposed by the likes of National, the Government has the parliamentary numbers to vote them through.
And Twyford said he, with help from a cross-party committee, had proposed a provision in the new laws that will make the 10 new water entities - one of which will take over from Auckland Council’s Watercare - “clearly” responsible for managing the entire stormwater network.
That includes all streams, regardless of whether they are on private or public land.
Part of allowing the water bodies to do that will include beefing up their long-term funding, he said.
Yet, while the new water bodies promise to pick up the bills, they will not give landowners “a free pass”, Twyford said.
He said he knows of cases in West Auckland where landowners have dumped rubbish into a stream, neglected it badly, planted trees where they shouldn’t and made blockages worse.
“The new entities under this law will have extensive powers to hold landowners accountable if they do obstruct or block the streams,” he said.
Auckland Council councillor Andy Baker said if the new reforms are “able to provide an answer, I’d love to see that”.
That’s because the recent floods had shown the current system isn’t working.
Still, Baker expects there isn’t an easy answer.
He said personal property rights need to be respected.
Many homeowners will not want a government body simply rolling onto their property at any time to undertake major earthmoving works. At the same time, private landowners need to take some responsibility for maintaining their land.
So a balance needs to be struck between personal property rights and a landowner’s responsibility to the community.
“It might be that you come up with a funding mechanism for private landowners if it’s their responsibility [to maintain streams],” Baker said.
“We’ve got to take our time to try and get this right, but also do it as quickly.
“We’ve got to hurry slowly.”
Any arrangement to ease the costs of stream maintenance will likely come too late to financially save Aujla, however.
Instead, she hopes her home will qualify as one that is deemed to be in a location not suitable for building and so will be bought by Auckland Council and the Government.
“I can’t see anything else happening to get us out of this,” she said.
