After the flood in Edgecumbe this year, I heard their regional council flood protection officer on the radio and realised that I was listening to the same worker who had been the Horizons flood protection officer in Wanganui in June 2015.
I recognised his voice, because in 2015 he had rung me to remonstrate about comments I had made in the paper about Horizons. Poor guy, I wonder where he is going next?
My experience of dealing with Horizons, and regional councils in general, is that more often than not you are paying through the nose to have to deal with drop-kicks.
When I was building a boatshed in Wellington Harbour, the Greater Wellington Regional Council there caused me no end of trouble.
My boatshed was near the mouth of the Hutt River and I got to learn from the local fishermen there about what the Greater Wellington Regional Council was doing with the Waiwhetu Stream, on the other side of the river.
It was marketed as environmental repair. The bed of the Waiwhetu Stream was dug up and taken away to remove the heavy metals and other pollutants that had come from the Seaview industrial area, the regional council had said.
The fishermen at the boatsheds thought that, primarily, the work was to widen the Waiwhetu because of flooding of businesses in the industrial area and they disputed it was that polluted, having caught whitebait in the stream for 50 years or more.
As reported in the Dominion Post (May 6, 2017): "Hutt Valley's Waiwhetu Stream was once the most polluted stream in the country.
"In 2009, the regional council spent $6 million removing a toxic sludge -- remnant of the area's industrial past.
"However, its water quality remains 'poor' and zinc levels exceed toxic warning levels. It's also the sink for the Hutt Valley's sewage overflow when its Seaview plant cannot cope in heavy rain."
Back in 2009 the Greater Wellington Regional Council had trucked the Waiwhetu sludge over the Wainuiomata Hill, and what remained on the trucks was deposited in a pile on the outskirts of Wainuiomata. The following summer residents complained about dust making washing on their clothes lines dirty.
It turned out that the source of the dust was the toxic sludge pile which had now dried out. The toxic sludge was then trucked over the Wainuiomata Hill and buried under topsoil in Silverstream.
We all make little mistakes, and to some degree we should be allowed to. It is how we learn, but it takes a regional council to make a really big one.
In the last quarter-century, since the Labour Government gave us regional councils, water quality has actually declined. One reason is the size of the country's herd of dairy cows has doubled in that time. Another is the inexorable imperative of the capitalist system: consumption.
What the state neatly did with the RMA, though, was to take the "ownership" of water away from the local authority and give it to an intermediary, in the form of the regional councils, to administer. The alternative is to give water back to the locality (along with the regional rates collected).
Regional councils are organised around water catchments and, now that the Whanganui River is a living entity, I wonder how it feels about being married to the Manawatu River? Time for a divorce, possibly.
When Fred Frederikse is not building, he is a self-directed student of geography and traveller.
