Land and Water Plan work 'not wasted'

Otago Regional Council chair Gretchen Robertson has praised council staff after a series of achievements including hours of work on a proposed Land and Water Plan, were highlighted in the council’s latest Annual Report.

“An annual report is a big deal for a council,” Councillor Robertson told today’s regional council meeting.

“It is what happens at the end of a whole year's work program right across our whole organization. “So just at a really high level, it's not a surprise that Land and Water Plan was a big one on our.

“So that's important to recognise.”

That proposed plan was supposed to have been debated at the meeting before the Government passed a last minute amendment to the law last night in Parliament.

“As we've all noted, all of those thousands of hours of work and investment by Otago rate payers does remain alive and will continue.

“That work was not wasted effort. That's important to note. It's all still sitting there.”

She added it had also been a great year for the council’s iwi partnership.

“Other highlights are the regional policy statement as well, coming together and, yeah, we've got that in place. We've done some work, as has been talked about earlier on mapping highly-productive land. And, we’ve begun important work to improve our air, working in the areas of biosecurity as well.

“There's a whole lot of work that often goes unnoticed or unspoken about, but isn't unnoticed. And that's stuff like our consents team, who worked tirelessly and put hundreds of resource consent applications together, particularly on new or existing effluent ponds, discharges, earthworks, pores, water tax, you name it, we're there where scrutinizing those activities and putting in appropriate conditions where we need to.

“We've got environmental monitoring as well. Another really key part of what we do, and one of our core functions of the council is to monitor the state of the environment - and we learn from that. “There’s a much wider program now around biodiversity, around soils, around also our air, the environment, the coast, all of those elements we monitor. We also work with the community more than ever.

“We've taken more than 100 enforcement actions related to pollution as well, so as well as the non regulatory stuff, we do our jobs in terms of regulatory as well, so we have taken some prosecutions as well in that period.

“We've delivered on a new website as well, which is pretty exciting and makes information more accessible for people. And we've been working with communities in South Dunedin and Glenorcy with natural hazards. And I guess another thing that's really, really important to note is the increasing patronage on our public transport systems as well and all of the work that has gone into that.”

Main image (Supplied / ORC): Otago Regional Council chair Gretchen Robertson.