Fish & Game fears ECan ‘turned blind eye’

An agency that fought for the Rakaia River to be protected is furious about a leaked report, which not only reveals breaches of its protection order, but that the regional council was not watching closely enough to act at the time.

The Canterbury river is protected by a water conservation order (WCO), the highest level of protection a New Zealand water body can receive.

Only 15 lakes and rivers have WCOs, 10 of them in the South Island.

Earlier this month, Newsroom uncovered a leaked copy of an as-of-yet unpublished Environment Canterbury (ECan) report, which made damning allegations against power company Trustpower and irrigation giant Central Plains Water Limited (CPWL).

The report, by an ex-senior staffer at ECan, found water flow at the river mouth was often well below the monthly minimum level, which suggested more water was being taken by consent-holders than allowed.

It revealed Trustpower, which has a hydroelectric power station at Lake Coleridge, did not seek a declaration from the Environment Court before implementing a new water storage system in 2015, even after it was advised to by ECan’s lawyers to make sure it met WCO conditions.

The report said Trustpower’s calculations for its new scheme repeatedly put it in breach of the conditions, by illegally creating stored water in the lake.

It also found CPWL – the South Island’s largest irrigation scheme – exceeded its consented rate several times, after it was also allowed to adopt an alternative strategy for taking water.

But ECan told Newsroom a statute of limitations meant it was only able to take enforcement action within a year of when it should have reasonably become aware an offence took place.

Data analysed in the report was several years old, and could not be acted on.

The report recommended that ECan install and monitor its own flow recorders in Lake Coleridge and its tributaries and said, as water regulator, ECan should be able to tell ‘‘at any given moment’’ how much water was entering and leaving the lake.

While ECan released copies of the May

2021 report to selected parties – including councillors – the copies had sections removed, including the executive summary, conclusions and recommendations.

Ray Grubb, chairman of the New Zealand Fish & Game Council, said that was not good enough. It was one of the lead agencies that fought to secure the Rakaia WCO in the

1980s, a process Grubb said had cost the organisation’s licence holders hundreds of thousands of dollars.

‘‘While we had an interest in safeguarding the fishery, the intent, and certainly the expectation, was that the Rakaia River would be protected for all Kiwis to enjoy in perpetuity.’’

Grubb said the leaked document raised two major red flags – a power company being able to amend the WCO without the necessary formal declaration required, and an irrigation consortium being allowed to exceed its consented water take without adequate monitoring by ECan.

‘‘If this is correct’’, Grubb said, ‘‘the regional council has turned a blind eye to the Rakaia being ‘impeded and manipulated’, as the ex-staffer states.

‘‘What ECan has done is the equivalent of giving logging interests the key to a national park, and free fuel for the chainsaws.’’

ECan was meant to be Canterbury’s environmental regulator, but monitoring and enforcement action on the Rakaia had been ‘‘woeful’’.

ECan science director Tim Davie said it was important to note three things about the report, which was just early work in an ongoing project to improve the council’s understanding of the interactions between the river, the natural environment and human activities.

‘‘This report is a draft and covers only

‘‘What ECan has done is the equivalent of giving logging interests the key to a national park, and free fuel for the chainsaws.’’ Ray Grubb

New Zealand Fish & Game Council chairman

the first part of the project – model development. Compliance is an important part of the project, but it is not the focus of this draft report . . . [and] this project is ongoing.’’

Davie would not be drawn on whether ECan would have considered prosecution had it received the data in time, or when councillors would discuss the Rakaia report.

He also did not comment on whether ECan had mismanaged the Rakaia WCO through inadequate monitoring.

‘‘. . . the model will help us work with consent holders to better understand compliance at both the individual and cumulative scales.’’ The science team had more work to do on the model, he said.

Trustpower’s general manager of generation, Stephen Fraser, told Newsroom it was working with ECan to provide the information and data needed for a complete report. “... we are confident that our operations are compliant with our resource consent conditions.”