Andrew von Dadelszen Former Regional Councillor

The working relationship between Tauranga City Council, Western Bay District Council and our regional council is generally very good. While it is important to have this rapport, that doesn't mean our environment should suffer – and I think that is exactly what is happening with the regional council taking a ‘softly softly' approach to environmental monitoring.

A classic example is the numerous sewage spills into our harbour over recent years. The cyclone a couple of weeks ago is the exception, but it just hasn't been, and it's time for the regional council to ‘harden up'. Your regional council is happy to prosecute a dairy farmer (rightly) to around $100,000 for a major effluent spill, but it is yet to prosecute our city council for even more serious sewage spills into our ‘at risk' harbour.

Those opposed to the concept of merging regional, city and district councils into one unitary council argue that you shouldn't have the ‘game keeper' (regional council) and the ‘poacher' (city and district councils) as the same entity, and yet as we have it now we have the regional council not doing its monitoring and policing role properly because it seems to fear upsetting the collaborative approach that has been developed as part of Smartgrowth.

It is the harbour that is suffering, and it is time to say ‘enough is enough'. I know this is not easy, but our harbour has to come first.

While I am on the subject of pollution getting into the harbour, I wrote a couple of years ago about engine waste oil from a Triton Street auto wrecker contaminating that site and ultimately our harbour. The regional council bent over backwards to give this polluter a chance to clean up his site, and after much frustration and very little progress the council issued an abatement notice. I understand that the site owner appealed to the Environment Court, who overturned the notice, saying the council hadn't given reasonable time, but it is interesting that a year on there is very little evidence of environmental improvement.

I understand council staff frustration, but we just can't let contaminants seep into our already degraded harbour. This site is a disgrace, and it is compounded by the city council allowing the road verge to also be used as a defacto part of his site. The city and regional council need to harden up and shut this business down if they don't get serious compliance.

If you have a view on these or any other local government issues, I invite you to email me.Email: andrew@vond.co.nz