Water fully allocated, says planner

BY PENNY WARDLE

The fully allocated sign is up on Marlborough's water.

Marlborough District Council principal planner Peter Constantine told the wine industry's Bragato conference in Blenheim yesterday that, on paper, 193.4 million cubic metres of water was allocated each week in the region, although a lot less was used.

The council would have to decide whether this 100 per cent allocation was sustainable or whether it needed to claw back allocations.

It might also decide to charge for water as a public resource being used to benefit private consent-holders, he said.

People were applying for water-use consent, then sitting on it and shutting others out, which was wasteful and inequitable, he said. The council might consider making consent-holders start using allocations straight away. Another possibility was separate consents for water systems and use.

"Given there was a full allocation, we might be happy for you to put a structure in the river but it could not be used unless you bought someone else's take."

One way the council dealt with over-allocation was stacking consents, he said. A grape grower might draw water in the four-month irrigation season, but the council might allocate the water to someone else outside that season.

"It could be interesting if there was climate change and grapes needed water for longer. How would we stack that consent?"

Another option was allocations based on the season. An irrigator could be allocated 80 per cent of their consented take if flow was down 20 per cent. However, this would require much better information on the quality and quantity of water available and whether users could manage around such unreliability.

Reducing the term of resource consents was another possibility, but that would leave people who had invested in irrigation hardware with no long-term guarantee of being able to get the water.

The Resource Management Act favoured using market forces to manage water, such as introducing tradeable shares for water so the allocation could be shifted around within catchments, he said. The council could clip the ticket on the way through.

A grower in the audience accused the council of allocating 100 per cent of water then clawing back allocation from people who had invested heavily in their vineyard and property.

"That's disgusting," he said.

Mr Constantine said he talked about clawing back only unused takes, but the grower noted he also mentioned imposing seasonal reductions according to flow. "Do you think you can fly that legally in New Zealand?" he said.

- The Marlborough Express