Serious non-compliance by Otago Regional Council consent holders has dropped, a monitoring and enforcement summary report for 2007-08 shows.
The council's compliance team completed 1019 audits and reviewed 1829 consent conditions for performance monitoring during the year.
At Thursday's compliance committee, councillors heard the level of compliance was up 2% on the previous year.
However, the more serious, grade 4 and 5 categories of non-compliance, were down from 25% (3310 in 2006-07 to 20% (208) in 2007-08.
Council resource management director Selva Selvarajah said the improvement was mainly due to ongoing monitoring and liaison with consent holders that the council had regular contact with.
About 58% of the 839 complaints received during the year were due to air issues with odour and burning/domestic heat systems featuring strongly, and 27% were related to water issues including 174 freshwater pollution complaints.
Committee chairman Doug Brown said compliance was fairly similar to the previous year with the dairy effluent issues featuring strongly in non-compliance.
During the year the compliance unit issued one abatement notice, 37 infringement fines, four enforcement orders and 28 prosecutions.
The infringement fines were mainly for backyard burning, freshwater pollution and dairy effluent discharge breaches, while 26 of the 28 prosecutions were due to the discharge of dairy effluent on to land and two were for the illegal diversion of water.
