After seven years of delays and consideration, the final resource consent decision has been made on using water from the lower Waitaki River and its tributaries, including the Hakataramea River.
Environment Canterbury (ECan) has issued the last decision needed on 52 resource consent applications for water from the Lower Waitaki catchment, some of which had been lodged before 2003.
The applications included two major projects - the Meridian Energy Ltd north bank tunnel electricity scheme and Meridian Energy Ltd-South Canterbury Irrigation Trust Hunter Downs irrigation scheme - worth a total of about $1.2 billion.
Other applications were mainly for irrigation, some new and some renewals of existing consents.
The final decision was on five consent applications by Bob Robertson for Foveran Deer Farm and Winterberg Station in the Hakataramea Valley.
One application was for Foveran to take water from the Hakataramea River and four for Winterberg to dam Homestead Stream and harvest water.
All were granted for a term of 35 years under conditions similar to 25 others granted last month to eight applicants in the Hakataramea Valley.
All 52 applications were caught in the controversy that surrounded Meridian's planned Project Aqua power scheme, cancelled in March 2004 and replaced with the north bank tunnel concept scheme.
The controversy of Project Aqua - a 60km-long canal with six power stations on the south side of the Waitaki River between Kurow and the State Highway 1 bridge - prompted the Government to get involved because of competing demands for water.
Then-minister for the environment Marian Hobbs called in and put on hold all the consent applications to use water in the Waitaki catchment, including those lodged by Meridian for Project Aqua.
The Government then set up a special five-member board to prepare a water-allocation plan for the whole of the Waitaki catchment.
The Waitaki catchment water-allocation regional plan became operative in 2006, and it was only then that ECan could start to process all the consent applications that had been called in.
It set up a hearings panel - former Environment Court judge Prof Peter Skelton (Christchurch), environmental consultant Mike Bowden (Kaiapoi) and freshwater scientist and ecologist Greg Ryder (Dunedin) - to hear all the applications relating to the lower Waitaki River.
That started with a hearing on Meridian's north bank tunnel scheme and the Hunter Downs irrigation scheme in Timaru in the second half of 2007.
Consents were granted for both proposals, but they are now before the Environment Court.
That was followed by hearings spread between August 11 and October 2, 2008, in Oamaru, on the rest of the lower Waitaki applications.
Decisions have been delivered on all of those.
Hearings on 122 consent applications above the Waitaki Dam started late last year before a new panel - Christchurch lawyer Paul Rogers, Mr Bowden, cultural authority Edward Ellison, of Otago Peninsula, and water quality consultant Jim Cooke, of Wellington - and were completed earlier this year.
They included applications for water to establish 16 new dairy farms in the Omarama and Ohau areas.
Decisions have yet to be delivered on those.
