38pc still to sign Wairau accords

Save the Wairau lawyer Mike Hardy-Jones has described TrustPower's progress with getting Wairau Valley residents to sign access agreements as "glacial".

At an Environment Court hearing on TrustPower's proposed hydro scheme in the Wairau Valley, TrustPower engineering manager Peter Lilley told the court that agreements had been signed with 62 per cent of landowners (whose property was crossed by the scheme), and a further 26 per cent were near completion.

"There are not one or two holdouts. Thirty-eight per cent have not as of today agreed and might not," Mr Hardy-Jones put to Mr Lilley, who acknowledged that this was the case. In his evidence, Mr Lilley said that most landowners whose land was crossed by the scheme subscribed to the irrigation scheme being developed for the valley by the Wairau Valley Irrigation Company.

This company had resource consent to abstract flow from the Wairau River but now intended to take TrustPower's offer of instead drawing from hydro scheme canals.

This proposal benefited both parties, said Mr Lilley.

The farmers gained financially by not being required to build their own scheme and TrustPower gained by being able to generate from the additional irrigation flow.

Fish & Game lawyer Marie Baker confirmed that TrustPower's resource consent to build its Wairau hydro scheme had a 10-year lapse period.

This meant that the 40 cubic metres of water TrustPower had applied to draw from the Wairau would be locked up while the company sought resource consent – and then, if successful, weighed up the scheme's viability, she said. The Wairau Valley Irrigation Company was able to gain an interim consent to access water, then once the scheme was up and running could transfer over this right.

- The Marlborough Express