Editorial: Council must come clean on pollution

In failing to disclose that more than 1000 homes could have been built on contaminated land, the Auckland City Council has grievously breached its obligation to ratepayers. Property owners should have been told immediately when a council study confirmed the problem two months ago. Instead, the council took a legalistic approach that paid no heed to the potential health hazard facing those owners, or the implied threat to property values. By any standards, this represents an egregious evasion of responsibility.

It is not as though the council did not have plenty of time to formulate a sensible policy. Auckland Regional Council research in 2001 reinforced overseas studies that had found former orchard land contained levels of DDT, arsenic, copper and lead exceeding health protection levels. Since then, councils have been mapping their own territories to pinpoint properties used in the past for horticulture. In Auckland City, the affected properties are believed to be in Avondale, Panmure, Otahuhu and Onehunga, all areas on the rural fringe before they were gobbled up by urban sprawl.

Once the problem was confirmed, the Auckland City Council decided to follow legal advice that, as a minimum response, it need only disclose the possibility of past horticultural activity on a land information memorandum (LIM) report at the time of a property sale. Given that LIM reports are usually ordered by potential buyers, not the vendor, most property-owners were destined to receive this bombshell in the most invidious of circumstances. Their understandable anger would also mean that the council's craven pursuit of secrecy was bound to fail.

The policy can be explained only by the council's concern over liability. It may, for example, be worried about the repercussions of having approved subdivisions on orchard land. Or fear that it will be faced with a large restoration bill, as happened to the Manukau City Council last year when, after five years of talking to residents, it finally cleaned up asbestos-affected soil on properties at Flat Bush.

Any which way, the policy is untenable. The property owners should have been notified immediately that the land on which their houses are built could contain dangerous levels of DDT, arsenic, lead and copper from dumped horticultural sprays. It is no excuse to suggest that the risk is negligible for people who do not grow vegetables, or eat dirt, and who wash their hands after contact with soil. Inevitably, there would be vegetable gardens on some of these properties. Worse still, and equally inevitably, some of the occupants will be toddlers who are prone to eat dirt. Talk of negligibility of risk also does not tally with the regional council study's finding that contaminants in about half of the 43 sites in the Auckland region exceeded "conservative guidelines for the protection of human health".

Belatedly, the Auckland City Council seems to have recognised the indefensibility of its policy. It is to write to property owners informing them of the potential contamination. That switch, however, occurred only after the Herald had begun making inquiries. It seems reasonable to assume that had council officers been left to their own devices, property owners would have been kept in the dark until they sought to sell their homes, or until the bad news was relayed by others in the area who had put their houses on the market.

At least one other council is being equally irresponsible. Three thousand properties have been identified as potentially affected in Waitakere City. Despite this large number, the Eco-City is also wedded to the idea that advice via LIM reports is sufficient notification. Quite simply, that policy cannot be sustained. When the safety of property owners is at issue, there can be no prevarication, or recourse to legal sophistry. Whatever the consequences, councils have no option but to come clean.