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Mid Canterbury households could be forced to pay for water by the litre within five years, a councillor has warned.
Ashburton district councillor Russell Ellis says the clear message from the Water Services Authority – Taumata Arowai that “within five years every household will have a meter, and it will be volumetric charging”.
Ashburton currently charges every household connected to its networks a flat fixed price.
But Ellis believes he heard “loud and clear” the legislation could make it mandatory to bring in volumetric charging.
Council chief executive Hamish Riach told Local Democracy reporting the water meter rollout underway in Mid Canterbury is for asset management and aimed at helping to find leaks.
The council’s current policy is not to charge for water services by volume, Riach said.
“Council could choose to consult the community on changing this policy position, but our current work on long-term plan budgets is consistent with the current policy and does not reflect a proposal to change to volumetric charging,” Riach said.
When Ellis raised the impending volumetric charging possibility at the council’s three waters committee meeting on Tuesday, Cr Carolyn Cameron was surprised as she believed Taumata Arowai’s responsibilities were “to cover water quality and drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater standards”, rather than how councils charged households for the services.
The Government’s Local Water Done Well legislation establishes a five-year transition timeframe to move away from property-value-based water rates toward usage-based mechanisms, such as water metering and volumetric charging, but doesn’t go as far as mandating it yet.
Ellis said the council will be faced with a choice if the Government mandated for it.
Cr Richard Wilson wanted to clarify that “no one in New Zealand pays for water”.
“Metering for water, you're not paying for the water. What you're doing is you're changing the mechanism that the cost of the infrastructure is delivered to different people.”
Signalled slowdown in meter rollout
The Ashburton District isn’t ready to transition to volumetric charging as it still needs to roll out water meters in Ashburton.
Infrastructure general manager Neil McCann said that is likely to be delayed as a water meter trial in Rakaia is six months behind schedule due to signal issues with the initial batch of meters.
“The delay in Rakaia will have a flow on effect to the installation of water meters in Ashburton and the rest of Rakaia.
“We want to have a good look at the data that can be harvested by the smart meters being trialled in Rakaia, and what council and homeowners will find useful.
“We’ll need about 10,000 smart meters for the rollout for Ashburton and Rakaia and that is now likely to be in 2027-28 and 2028-29 financial years.”
The council is working with digital metering company Intellihub to trial 350 smart meters on the eastern side of the township and is now expecting replacement meters by January.
McCann said connectivity is challenging in the Rakaia township area, and some of the poorer-performing meters are being replaced with antenna-enabled meters.
The meters being installed in Rakaia send data by wi-fi every 30 minutes, while the 1213 different meters installed in Methven in 2022 are electronically read every three months.
The Rakaia meters were all supposed to be installed for the trial six months ago to give the council time to consider which meters it would then roll out across Ashburton, with $3.5m in this year’s budget and the same for next year for the wider roll out.
McCann added that every new connection to the council’s water network is required to have a smart meter, “though we are not currently harvesting data”.
The 2025/26 Annual Report highlighted the average water consumption of 786 litres per resident per day, above the target of less than 720 litres, and that without universal metering, the council is unable to reliably distinguish between high consumption and leakage.
-LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
