Brian Rudman: Thirsty Rodney bites the hand that quenches

If I lived in the middle of a desert and my well was drying up, I'd welcome the arrival of the next village's water truck with much ululation. Certainly I wouldn't be sitting in a dark room plotting ways of surprising my benefactor with exorbitant new parking fees.

But the same can't be said for Rodney district councillor Penny Webster and a majority of her colleagues on the council's asset-management committee.

Last month, instead of laying out the red carpet for a $20 million new reservoir and associated works that regional ratepayers are offering to build for them to ease the growing water crisis on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula, these councillors are doing just the opposite. They have decided the $412,500 sale price for the 4538sq m site Watercare Services wants to buy from the council for the new reservoir is too low.

This, despite it being the price agreed by officials from both sides after averaging the independent valuations both parties submitted.

Mrs Webster is the one-term Act MP whose 15 minutes of fame came when she broke parliamentary convention after her defeat in 2002 and made headlines for using air points accumulated as an MP for a private trip.

She led the challenge to the reservoir sale price at the February 10 meeting, suggesting the land could potentially be valuable as a site for transmitters or some other commercial use.

The committee called for a revaluation and demanded a report on whether the reservoir could be buried to mitigate its visual impact, and whether the site could be leased rather than sold.

Property manager Mark Johannsen wrote to Watercare outlining these issues and stating that an updated valuation of the land was now $500,000, not the $450,000 the council had proposed. In addition, he said the potential income stream from leasing the property as a transmission site (to parties unstated) was an additional $400,000.

He proposed that a total sale price of $900,000 plus GST might alleviate the councillors' concerns.

Watercare's response was apoplectic. And you can hardly blame it. Watercare and Rodney had earmarked the Scott Rd property as a reservoir site as far back as March 1998. It was designated as such on the council's district plan and a purchase price of $412,500 had been agreed between them in good faith.

The reservoir design fully complied with zoning requirements, tenders had been received and Watercare planned to begin work this month so that the reservoir would be in service by next summer.

Watercare said burying the reservoir was possible, but would require new geotechnical investigations and redesign work which would delay the project by three months and add $600,000 to costs. It would also reduce the water pressure available.

It attacked the revaluation as fundamentally flawed, given that the original valuations had been on a "full best use" basis.

Watercare also bluntly rejected the idea of leasing the land, saying it was not interested in investing in significant new infrastructure on leased property.

The issue goes back to next Thursday's full council for reconsideration, with, I understand, "a strong recommendation" from officials that the sale go ahead at the original price of $412,500.

That councillors could consider any other option seems unimaginable. Watercare is not a giant international telecommunication conglomerate, fair game for a bit of creative land pricing. It's a community-owned water utility, charged with supplying bulk water at the cheapest price possible. Given the planned investment of $20 million, there's surely a better case for Rodney offering up the land for nothing than there is for it searching for ways of gouging the utility.

Particularly so when for much of the time between mid-January and mid-February this year, water supplies on the Hibiscus Coast were in a state of "high alert."

As population growth explodes on the peninsula, the threat of water shortages is now an annual summer ritual, and all the water conservation campaigns in the world aren't going to change that. A new reservoir will.

If the present circus continues at Rodney and the reservoir isn't completed by next year, thirsty Whangaparaoa residents will know whom to blame. And I don't mean Watercare.