Serious breaches of resource consent conditions have more than doubled in the past year.
However, the Government's water metering requirements were mostly to blame for the increase, Otago Regional Council environmental services manager Martin King said at a recent committee meeting.
The council's consents compliance monitoring and incident summary report for 2012-13 shows it carried out 1225 audits or inspections relating to 980 activities and reviewed 3317 consent conditions relating to 1018 consents in the past year.
Rural, territorial authority, and industrial consents were reviewed to see if they met their conditions to provide the council with data (performance monitoring), while others were audited or inspected by council staff to see if they met the conditions.
The performance monitoring review showed significant non-compliance in 22 cases, up from 10 the previous year and five the year before that. This year, the majority, 65%, had minor non-compliance.
Auditing of consents was prioritised based on environmental risk and this year serious non-compliance was found in 11% of cases (133) compared with 3% (43) the year before. Of those audited 62% were found to have minor non-compliance.
''The level of compliance has steadily decreased since 2007-08 .. . full compliance has dropped 12% in that time.''
Mr King explained that the problems faced by landowners, mostly irrigators, in meeting water metering regulations were the major factor in the increase, due to the shortage of installers and the difficulty of metering for certain water takes.
In addition, there were those who had had meters installed but not verified, which meant there was no guarantee their data was accurate.
There were still 120 people who had failed to respond to council attempts to contact them. Site inspections would be done during the next two months to confirm which users had not made attempts to install a meter.
''It is expected enforcement action will be taken against those who have made no progress.''
There was still a concern some of the non-compliance could be the result of poor effluent quality and maintenance of commercial and industrial waste systems, he said.
Chairman Stephen Woodhead said there were always some issues with biological systems so, realistically, there was not a major problem.
