Council urges community engagement on drinking water proposals

Many small water suppliers in the region will be caught up in the proposed changes to standards of drinking water, says Waikato Regional Council.

In its submission on the proposed amendments to the National Environmental Standards for Sources of Human Drinking Water (NES-DW) and the Improving the protection of drinking-water sources discussion document, the council has asked the Government to engage with communities and suppliers, so they are fully aware of compliance requirements.

At Tuesday’s Strategy and Policy meeting, there was robust conversation around what the proposed amendments would mean for small water suppliers, including farmers, bach owners and those on small community supplies.

The amendments seek to correct gaps in the activities that pose risk to source water and provide adequate protection to water supplies serving less than 500 people, therefore there will be more registered “water suppliers” under the NES-DW.

The proposals will also require regional councils to map the default source water risk management areas (SWRMA) for all registered drinking water supplies in their region.

Strategy and Policy chair Pamela Storey says the committee approved of the proposed amendments in principle, however more information was needed, and that information also had to be shared with those impacted.

“We want safe drinking water for everyone – we feel very strongly about the need to provide for the health and wellbeing of our communities,” says Cr Storey.

“But we’re concerned about how this will work in practice. There are many suppliers who will be caught up in this. Many farms in this region supply water to farmhouses, and that means they will need to treat those supplies and follow the standards.

“We don’t want this to be over-complicated for our rural communities or costs to be too prohibitive, otherwise we will see wholesale non-compliance of a system that is set up to fail.” 

As with all the council’s recent submissions to the Government, it was noted that sufficient resourcing needed to be provided by central government to ensure successful implementation and uptake.

“There will be a cost to the council, to map the water areas and amend plans to align with the proposed amendments. And this cost is inevitably handed down to our ratepayers,” says Cr Storey.

“We want more tools in the toolkit to identify what constitutes a water supplier, and central government needs to connect closely with communities on this.”