Editorial: Diet time for tubby Ecan

Environment Minister Nick Smith has sent Environment Canterbury an old-fashioned rocket over its performance on consenting, and he was right to do so.

The regional authority managed to process just 29 per cent of resource consents on time in the 2007-2008 period, a result Dr Smith regarded as abysmal. It is hard to imagine a business that delivered its goods late 71 per cent of the time surviving and prospering. It is lucky for Ecan that it is in the local government business, and not the private sector.

Ecan has two main defences. The first is that 45 per cent of the consents it dealt with related to water, and allocating water is a complex business.

Still, if mankind can work out a way to send people to the moon, we should be able to come up with a way of dividing up who gets what in the way of water.

The second issue is to do with Ecan's workload. The regional council has double the consenting workload of any other regional authority, which means staff are busy. The subtext of this is the Resource Management Act which successive Governments have promised, but failed, to fix.

The workload problems give rise to a couple of important questions. The first is the basic one, upon which Dr Smith may want to confer on with his colleague and local Government Minister Rodney "Supersizer" Hide.

Is Ecan too unwieldly? The short answer is yes.

The council, which inherited its responsibilities from 33 local authorities after the "big bang" local Government reforms of the late 1980s, stretches from Kaikoura in the north down to Waimate. Ecan will be 20 years old in November which means the organisation has had two decades to understand what its role is and get on top of the work. Clearly, it is failing.

Local body politicians in South Canterbury have been flagging for some time that Ecan is not working and will presumably make a meal out of the performance report. The difficult teenager is now an adult and it needs to go on a diet. The needs of the disparate regions within its boundaries are not being met. Its staff are clearly unable to cope with the volume of work the monster attracts. For Mr Hide, who is trying to build the Auckland Supercity, Ecan is a clear reminder that big is not necessarily better.

For South Canterbury farmers, who in some cases have been waiting for more than a decade for applications to win consent, the solution is simple. The region should be chopped off and Ecan's responsibilities delegated to a single unitary authority for South Canterbury.

Dr Smith is correct. Ecan's consenting performance is abysmal. Now he's got that off his chest it is up to him to help fix it.

- © Fairfax NZ News