Both Clutha District Council and Central Otago District Council met to decide how to handle future water service delivery.
They, alongside the Gore and Waitaki district councils, have been considering whether to form a jointly-owned council controlled organisation (CCO) in order to address the cost of water infrastructure upgrades necessitated by more stringent government regulations.
The Waitaki District Council dropped out of the group following a vote on Monday, while the Gore District Council meets this coming Monday to make its decision.
Yesterday, the decision by Central Otago councillors seemed to be motivated more by a sense of inevitability than enthusiasm.
Chief executive Peter Kelly said there was little choice for the council.
Meeting the required water standards on its own would send it over the allowed level of debt.
Cr Martin McPherson said he sympathised with ratepayers who had been happily drinking water for 30 years that overnight had become non-compliant.
In the past, water regulators had chosen not to intervene, but were now enforcing, and increasing, the requirements without offering funds to help councils comply.
"I worry that we are being set up to fail."
Council Three Waters group manager Julie Muir said past councils had deferred work to keep rates down and there had not been operational funding to make clever decisions about what needed doing.
Most work in the water area was reactive.
Until 2019, regulations had said councils should comply "where reasonably practical to do so".
That changed when four people died and 5000 people became ill after Havelock North’s water supply was contaminated with campylobacter in 2016, she said.
In Clutha, councillors voted 9:4 in favour of a joint CCO.
Following the vote, Clutha District Mayor Bryan Cadogan said, despite a "pantomime of a process", the message from central government and industry experts had been clear.
"While there was the perception of three options, there was actually only one.
"I thank the public for their involvement, but when you’re armed with all the information, there was only one option.
"Unfortunately none of the three options fully gave us the relief we were seeking for the district."
However, he said the joint CCO gave the best chance of moving forward successfully, and avoiding government taking over councils’ decisions about water.
"We want to protect the people we serve from intervention from a Crown specialist," he said.
"That would be a breakdown of the entire democratic structure."
Representatives from the Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) had earlier outlined the penalties for any council’s water services plan failing to meet new financial sustainability rules.
These included intervention by a government "facilitator" to work alongside councils for mild non-compliance, or a "specialist" with extensive powers of mandate for more serious failures.
All councils have to submit their water services delivery plans to the DIA by September 3.
Several Clutha councillors bemoaned the compressed timeframe for council decision-making, while central government had yet to make decisions on aspects of regulation that could affect final costs.
Cr Brent Mackie, who voted against the joint CCO, said incomplete information meant voting for the CCO was "impossible".
"Without full information, it’s like putting on the roof before you’ve done the foundation. I resent the government coming down with its big stick ... [when they] should be praising us, not bullying us."
Both councils will meet to discuss their final water services delivery plans on August 3.
