Legal advice will be sought over the status of a privately operated Wanaka landfill as council officers dig deep into paperwork stretching back more than 20 years to resolve a stoush over resource consent compliance issues and ownership.
Queenstown Lakes District Council chief executive Duncan Field and Wanaka Community Board chairman Lyal Cocks were briefed yesterday by Lakes Environmental enforcement officer Tim Francis and they gave him another week to seek advice from Wanaka lawyer Graeme Todd and prepare his report.
‘‘I have asked him to write that [report] on the basis it will be publicly released,'' Mr Field said when contacted yesterday.
The issue arose after Riverbank Rd residents Jo Dippie and Angus Gordon expressed concerns about the contents of the landfill and raised the possibility of future water bore contamination.
Ms Dippie was also concerned the large landfill could pose a Cardrona River flood hazard.
Wanaka Landfill Ltd began operating at the site near the Wanaka transfer station and the Cardrona River in 1999 after signing a purchase agreement with QLDC.
The QLDC had an agreement to purchase the land from the Otago Regional Council.
Mr Field yesterday recalled the purchase price was about $90,000.
However, despite handing over possession, the QLDC has not completed the sale agreement and Mr Field said he intended discussing issues surrounding ownership with the regional council today.
Mr Field said Mr Francis had gathered up all the resource consents and district plan land designations created for all the land near the landfill and not just the site in dispute.
That land includes the QLDC transfer station, Wanaka Wastebusters and other land on the corner of Riverbank and Ballantyne roads.
‘‘He is well through the assessment of all that - what complies and what doesn't. He also wants to get some advice from Graeme Todd about some of the provisions in the designation. Some are quite old and date back 20 or more years. [The designations are] not as clear and unequivocal as they are written today,'' Mr Field said.
Mr Field said the issues in the Wanaka landfill case were, in some ways, not unlike those encountered in recent Queenstown gravel extraction cases.
At least four companies applied for consent to extract gravel from the Shotover River after resource management laws changed, meaning existing operators needed consent to continue doing what they already were doing.
One operator had been extracting gravel since 1981 but his application could not be heard first because a 1997 precedent meant the first company to get its application in had priority. That was Fulton Hogan.
A series of four applications were opposed by competing operators, tourism operators and others while planners raised concerns about the cumulative effects on the environment.
The consent hearings and related litigation dragged on for several years before being resolved.
Several gravel extraction consent applications are being processed for the land subject to the Wanaka investigations, including applications made by Wanaka Landfill Ltd and Upper Clutha Transport Ltd.
