Former member of Parliament, Cr Hilary Calvert, now says Environment Minister David Parker - who has been critical of the council’s water plans - "should concentrate on making the rules around local people being able to vote on local issues more realistic".
Council chairwoman Marian Hobbs said the decision to pull the discussion on the council’s so-called Omnibus water plan change was made because, with two apologies and just 10 council members present, she did not have the six members she required to reach a quorum to conduct business.
Crs Alexa Forbes and Carmen Hope sent apologies for Wednesday’s meeting, but Ms Hobbs said she could not say which councillors had a possible conflict of interest on water issues.
A "goodly number" had approached the Office of the Auditor-general, or public law authority Mai Chen, for advice on the matter.
"It’s huge," she said.
"This is not done to cause a stymie, but if [this week] people had decided to stay at the table and decided to discuss this - if I hadn’t withdrawn the paper - they could have been liable to be taken to the cleaners and charged and removed from council.
"And worse than that, the decisions could be overturned and that goes against all the work we’re trying to do under duress and at speed to actually meet our water planning obligations."
Among the requests Ms Hobbs said she had made to the Government was whether the plan change, to be notified by the end of March, could be delayed six weeks.
"This isn’t the only regional council - and, in fact, I think you’ll find conflict of interest in just about every regional council in New Zealand," Ms Hobbs said.
Late last year, Mr Parker said the council suffered from a historic underinvestment in science, planning and hydrological modelling and was not on track to develop a fit-for-purpose freshwater planning framework.
Yesterday, a spokesman for Mr Parker said the minister’s office had been informed of the outcome of Wednesday’s meeting but he had not yet been briefed on the matter.
Cr Calvert said the rules about councillors’ conflicts of interest were "unrealistically" stringent.
"Minister Parker has decreed that we should make changes to our basic planning documents.
"If he wants us to achieve his goals, he should arrange for the Auditor-general to find a way we can have a quorum," she said.
"The people of Otago have chosen us to decide their issues. We are bound to own property around Otago, some of which involves water.
"Perhaps the minister should concentrate on making the rules around local people being able to vote on local issues more realistic."
A spokesman for the Office of the Auditor-general said it was aware of the issue and that the council intended to make applications under the Local Authorities (Members’ Interests) Act on behalf of some councillors, but it had yet to receive those applications.
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This is "Huge" but unfortunately most of the urban living people are to stupid to care. During the recent local elections there was huge interest in the race for Mayor with one of the key issues being the environment and in the end the majority voted in a Mayor
who is a member of the Green Party. Which is fine except for the fact that it is the regional council who have the greater responsibility for protecting our environment, not the city council. However rural communities care very much about who is elected onto the regional councils, their livelihoods are at stake. This is why regional councils have so many councillors with rural connections. Or to put it in more simple terms for the stupid, we have a Greenie who is responsible for urban development and services (but NOT the buses) and farmers who are responsible for protecting our waterways! Thank goodness Hobbs got elected.