It also said the future of Port Otago should be decided sooner rather than later.
The ORC is meeting today to discuss proposed government reforms which will put it out of business.
The government has proposed a ‘‘Head Start’’ programme where local government must come up with new unitary authorities by August 9, which will eventually oversee the functions of regional councils.
If territorial authorities fail to agree they will have a programme imposed on them by the government.
According to a report presented today’s council meeting, the regional council holds total assets of $1.14 billion, dominated by its $788.1 million shareholding in Port Otago, alongside $127.3m of fixed assets.
The report states however the region is reorganised, functions will be best sustained when responsibility for them is held at a catchment scale, with backing from a dedicated funding base.
The paper states reform offers gains in simplification, reduced duplication and economies of scale.
But several of the ORC’s functions, particularly water and flood management, biosecurity, environmental monitoring and hazard work, depend on being managed at catchment or regional scale and on the continuity of long-term data and specialist expertise.
Port Otago’s dividend — $18m last year — helped fund council activities and reduced rates.
‘‘How this shareholding, and the income it generates, would be held and applied under any reorganisation is one of the most significant financial questions reform raises for Otago,’’ the report states.
‘‘It is not settled at the outline stage and would be worked through in detailed design, but its size means it warrants attention early rather than late.’’
The report states natural systems do not organise themselves according to territorial boundaries.
River catchments, pest populations, air quality zones and natural hazard footprints all operated at scales regularly exceeding those of any single district.
‘‘Water moves through connected systems ... so management works best when governance boundaries follow the water rather than cut across it.
‘‘Where that alignment breaks down, the consequences are not theoretical.
‘‘They show up in gaps in coverage, disputed accountability and outcomes worse for communities than co-ordinated management would have produced.’’
The report concludes the most effective response is one plan, one set of rules and one co-ordinated programme across the full extent of any problem such as a pest, for example.
Splitting responsibility across smaller areas with different budgets and competing priorities did not reduce the pest, it relocated the failure point.
Regional council records extended back 50-60 years at some sites.
That depth of recording was what allowed scientists to distinguish a ‘‘bad year’’ from a genuine long-term decline and to identify a trend which demanded a management response rather than a fluctuation that did not.
Split across multiple authorities with different methods, different budget cycles and different institutional priorities, monitoring records had become increasingly difficult to compare over time.
‘‘Once a long-run baseline is broken, it cannot be reconstructed.’’
Splitting water management would lead to broken relationships and create costs and a lack of consistency.
Specialist staff necessary for environment management could be difficult to source and fund for more than one territorial authority, the report states.
‘‘Specialist roles are not simply transferable.
‘‘They take years to build and, once lost, leave gaps that are slow and expensive to fill.’’
The council discussed orphaned functions where schemes such as biosecurity programmes and water quality testing were seen as costly to maintain and easy to underfund in any given annual planning cycle and their value was only fully apparent when they were absent.
Once flood infrastructure was built, all properties and assets within the protected area benefited regardless of whether they contributed to its cost.
This non-excludable character created underinvestment risk ‘‘whenever responsibility is divided, because no single authority bears the full cost of inadequate protection and the incentive to invest to the right level is diluted’’.
