Sacked ECan board was no damp squib

BY ROD ORAM

OPINION: CLEARLY THE Key government loves to create havoc and enemies over local government and natural resources.

Fresh from stripping voters' influence over Auckland's regional governance and picking a fight over mining conservation land, it has sacked Canterbury's regional councillors and poisoned the process aimed at finding more sensible ways to manage New Zealand's water resources.

It is frightening how easy it was for Local Government Minister Rodney Hide and Environment Minister Nick Smith to deal to Canterbury. All they had to do was to appoint Wyatt Creech, a dairy industry investor and former National Party politician, to head a panel to review the performance of Environment Canterbury then sit back and wait for his report.

Sure enough, Creech and colleagues delivered in double-quick time a damning indictment of ECan. They concluded that the gap between what was required of it on water issues and what it was capable of delivering is "enormous and unprecedented".

In fact ECan was such a basket case, it argued, that its "failure requires comprehensive and rapid intervention on the part of central government to protect and enhance both regional and national well-being."

There was, though, a minor inconvenience, the panel conceded. Whatever the shortcomings of the council, it had not breached its duties under either the Resource Management Act or the Local Government Act so the only way to boot out the councillors was by passing emergency legislation.

The government obliged last week, appointing Dame Margaret Bazley as chief commissioner of the region. She will be joined by up to six more commissioners. They will run the council until 2013 at the latest.

This is an appalling abuse by the government of power, process and good sense, not to mention voters' rights.

The problems start with the Creech Report itself. It spends its first 48 pages faithfully reporting all the complaints of ECan's critics. Two camps dominate the short list of parties it interviewed:

The region's local councils, some of which have long lobbied to disband the regional council so they can become unitary authorities. Christchurch and Timaru lead the movement. Yet, apart from a letter to the ministers and a hastily concocted list of complaints about ECan, they offered no substantive written evidence of its alleged failings. But if they get their way we can give up any hope of achieving integrated and sustainable resource management across the Canterbury plain.

Farmer-led organisations pushing very hard for more water storage and irrigation. Since 2002, the number of cows in Canterbury has increased by 60.5%, the report notes. That's an additional 239,000 cows, which account for 47% of the growth of the national herd. No wonder the region has escalating issues with water allocation and effluent. The RMA can't cope. Hobbled by it, ECan has performed the best it can.

These critics told the panel that the regional council is "dysfunctional" because it is, among other things, deadlocked between seven councillors who are pro-development and seven who are pro-environment; let down by substandard and "arrogant" staff; negligent in the performance of its statutory obligations; obstructive to the courts and incapable of a constructive relationship with its 10 local councils.

Having faithfully detailed the critics' complaints, the report then concedes it can't find any evidence for some of the accusations. Next, it actually looks at ECan's performance and finds reality is a whole lot better than the perception put about by its critics.

A deadlocked council? No. For example it voted 10 to two to support the Canterbury Water Management Strategy. It is the region's best hope for involving all parties in collaborative allocation and management of water, thereby achieving a sustainable economy and environment.

Obsessed about being a hard-line environmental regulator at the expense of other drivers? No. It's done a good job on the region's urban development, energy, transport and biodiversity strategies, among others. All ECan's non-water responsibilities "we believe are well executed", the panel concluded.

Poor relationships with other councils? No. They have improved a lot, particularly under Alec Neill, its current chair, the panel says.

Lousy service standards? The 2007/08 Ministry for the Environment national survey of local government did find that ECan met its statutory timetable commitments on only 29% of resource consents. But the panel concedes "there are some valid reasons why the timeframe compliance was low." The council was swamped by claims to irrigation water before the region ran out. It is close to fully allocating many water sources and has already over-allocated some to the detriment of the environment.

The panel also concedes that ECan had increased its consents staff from 35 to 57 and "improved processes and systems". ECan's goal was to meet timelines on more than 95% of consents within 12 months. "It is considered that if ECan continues with this approach its survey result in the next MfE survey will be significantly improved."

Having failed to prove that ECan is anywhere near as bad as its critics contend, the review panel then goes on to make two extraordinary assertions.

Firstly, that the RMA is perfectly capable of handling the two big problems with managing water resources: the intensifying competition between users for the fast-dwindling volume of water left to allocate and the cumulative effect whereby each consent to take water from a river or aquifer may seem small and reasonable on its own but in aggregate they tip it into unsustainability.

Thus, the reviewers argue, the problem is the council not the legislation so sack the councillors, override voters and bang in commissioners. But the government says the RMA is failing to deal with those issues and has embarked on a raft of changes, is designing an Environmental Protection Agency to take some powers and responsibilities from local government and is seeking, through the Land and Water Forum, new collaborative ways to handle these issues.

Secondly, the panel argued for creating a Canterbury Regional Water Authority to take over all freshwater issues. That is a crazy idea. You can't deal with water in isolation from resource, environmental and economic issues as it would go against the integrated resource management of past decades.

Thankfully, the government says it won't decide whether structural change is needed at ECan until the Land and Water Forum delivers in mid-year its recommendations for new collaborative water mechanisms for the whole country and the government has decided how extensive it will make the EPA's national powers.

Actually, ECan has made great progress pioneering new ways to resolve these very difficult water issues. The centrepiece is the Canterbury Water Management Strategy, the result of ECan's painstaking work. The strategy has the potential to promote sustainable water use that will aid economic growth.

But to make it work, ECan needed the government to modify the RMA and Local Government acts. It had also sought, but failed to receive, from this government and its predecessor other legislative help to do its job better.

Then last week National acted by modifying the acts to create some of those powers. But instead of handing them to the elected councillors, it used the Creech report as a flimsy excuse for replacing them.

Such high-handed tactics only fuel suspicions that the government, which has made more irrigation a plank of its economic platform, is siding with landowners who consider their water allocations are property rights to be protected at all costs and those who are pushing for damming more rivers. So much for collaboration, the only hope for sustainable water use.

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