What’s on in council this week by Larry Foster
Published February 14, 2022 1:51PM
There is a Finance and Performance meeting scheduled for Wednesday, an Operations meeting Thursday, followed by a Dog Control Bylaw review workshop. All these meetings will be on Zoom so will probably take longer than normal. At the time of writing I had only received a public-excluded agenda for Finance and Performance so I’m not sure what is in the public section of the agenda.
The Operations agenda is very small with the only item a progress report on establishing a potable water source for carrier supply and community collection in Ruatoria.
The council has allocated $505,000 from the Government’s three waters reform stimulus grant to provide potable water to the Ruatoria community. A potential location at Whakarua park has been identified by the council’s environmental science staff and discussions have been held with the chair of Whakarua Park, Te Runanganui o Ngati Porou and several community representatives regarding the possibility of leasing land for the bore and filling station. Council has since had possible leasing option discussions with the full Whakarua Park committee and TRONPnui. A basic site design has been drafted to help facilitate community and landowner discussions. Initial work on the cultural impact report has started along with a possible memorandum of understanding with TRONPnui. The project team plans to work together with environmental science staff to ensure there is consistency across multiple projects in the area, with the aim to share drilling costs and to validate the capacity of the bore.
The main components to this project are:
■ Construction of a bore, treatment plant and multiple fill-up points to allow both commercial and domestic access to potable water for cartage to top up rainwater tanks.
■ Siting of a containerised treatment plant with extraction to raw water reservoir storage tanks, filtration and UV treatment processes. This will provide the community with access to compliant, safe drinking water.
■ Construction of a secure facility with treated water reservoir storage tanks for water carrier access and a separate tank for general public access. The facility extraction and treatment processes are to be automated and have telemetry control capability.
■ Development of a publicly accessible terminal for a community collection point and bulk cartage point for local carriers.
■ Confirmation of the amount of groundwater extraction that is possible at the Whakarua site, which will require investigation drilling and drawdown testing.
Access to safe drinking water is a major issue for the Ruatoria community, both in quality and quantity. The existing Racecourse Road spring and the Waiapu River remain the major water sources during summer and both do not meet potable water standards. A condition of the three waters reform funding is that it be spent quickly, by June 2022, so communities can benefit almost immediately from the jobs the money is paying for and improved water services. The provision of potable water will significantly improve the wellbeing of this community.
A review of the Dog Control Policy and Bylaw was approved by the Sustainable Tairawhiti committee late last year so we will be workshopping this after the Operations meeting. Staff are seeking councillor feedback on five updates to the policy and bylaw. These are:
Making on-lead the default setting for the urban area, with specified prohibited and off-lead areas; increasing the number of dogs allowed on a premises before a permit is required from one to two; adding assessment criteria to the policy; prohibiting dogs on Kaiti Beach to protect the penguin colony; changes to the currently prohibited off-lead areas.
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