A government plan for national wastewater disposal standards is being met with local concern it could harm waterways.
The plan, proposed in a Water Services Authority — Taumata Arowai consultation that ended yesterday, could end regional councils’ ability to issue disposal consents with higher standards that are considerate of local environmental impacts.
An official response from the Otago Regional Council is expected to flag that the plan risks a "one-size-fits-all approach".
A draft response from the Dunedin City Council, which has been given an extension to May 1 to respond, has expressed concern that resource management instruments, prepared with mana whenua and communities, would be "over-ridden" and result in a "more permissive" approach to discharges to water rather than land.
There needed to be a "backstop" opportunity for community engagement, it said.
The Environmental Law Initiative (ELI), a charity run by environmental lawyers, said the proposed standards risked further decades of sub-standard wastewater disposal to water bodies.
The charity flagged the Local Government (Water Services) Bill, which is progressing concurrent to the development of the standards, would give the power to set the standards to ministers rather than Taumata Arowai.
ELI legal adviser Reto Blattner de-Vries described the proposed changes as having "massive implications" that would "entrench" lower-cost wastewater treatment plants that would be given 35-year consents.
The changes would "allow councils to put their hands up and absolve themselves from pursuing culturally-appropriate discharge solutions which differ from the status quo, such as changing a discharge to water to a land-based discharge."
Councils would not be able to decline an application for a discharge consent for a wastewater treatment plant that met the standards even if it contributed to various adverse effects listed in s107 of the Resource Management Act, he said.
"A proposal of this gravity should be highlighted more by government ... The proposals take away localised discretion by councils which will mean councils won’t have incentives to work with communities to find local solutions."
ORC deputy chairman Cr Lloyd McCall said the ORC had submitted a comprehensive submission on the proposed wastewater standards and councillors had been given opportunity to input. The submission had, overall, supported a drive for efficiency in dealing with wastewater, but also outlined concerns around the protection of coastal and freshwater environments.
"A proposed definition of pristine in its current form would not protect our highly valued lakes and their tributaries from degradation. The submission highlights this unintended consequence of a one-size-fits-all approach to water quality expectations."
He said there was a need for rationalisation of wastewater management and regulation and it was also "essential that there is the ability for significant local community input into the receiving environment’s water quality visions and outcomes."
Cr Alan Somerville said: "The whole drive is to come up with standardised solutions that don’t take into account environmental conditions and community aspirations for environmental protection.
"This doesn’t allow for particular local circumstances."
He called for consideration of disposal to land, as a more mana whenua culturally appropriate response, and an end to an acceptance that wastewater could be dumped in the ocean without treatment if there was an overflow situation.
The DCC has four resource consents that allow it to discharge wastewater overflows to freshwater and the ocean.
Overflows can occur when wastewater pipes get inundated with stormwater.
In South Dunedin, overflows have been channelled down a pipe called the "contamination vector" leading into the harbour and have sometimes flowed out on to Surrey St.
Cr Andrew Noone said the government needed to now "set the bar high enough to ensure it was environmentally sustainable and doesn’t cause greater degradation than we have currently got".
