QLDC declares new sewage failure - then denies it

Queenstown Lakes District Council informed the regulator Otago Regional Council last week of an ongoing “Crusting Event” that indicates a serious malfunction of the main Shotover wastewater plant (see video below). QLDC councillors have not been informed. The deputy mayor has called for a halt to all commercial and residential development until the long-failing plant can be fixed.
At the same time the QLDC told Crux that there was no sewage malfunction and council CEO Mike Theelen said we had “scant regard for the truth” in our reporting. Photographic evidence from Crux was ignored.
A new investigative journalism tool from the Google News Initiative, Pinpoint, has allowed Crux to analyse over 21 legal documents filed with the Environment Court by the Otago Regional Council. The initial results in our story are more than significant and suggest a five year sewage cover up by the QLDC.

There is increasing evidence that quite apart from the catastrophic failure of the disposal field, the main plant is also on the brink of total failure. The failure of the entire sewage plant, especially if complex, time consuming and expensive fixes are forced by the Environment Court, would be enough to stop hundreds of millions of dollars of fast tracked development - including 6,000 new houses and numerous commercial projects. The time scale waiting for a fix could be up to five years.

The regulator, ORC issued the following statement to Crux this afternoon.

“ORC were notified about floating solids on the clarifier last week. ORC staff are working to understand any risks to compliance associated with this. Questions about operational issues around the plant should be sent to QLDC. ORC staff have been on site this week and last week as part of the continued monitoring of the site. Samples were taken last week (Wed 19 Feb) and ORC is waiting for the results of the samples.”

QLDC, in line with recent practice, have missed our deadline to comment or answer our questions. (See their late response further down.)

They did however answer one question put to them by us earlier this week. In October 2024 they hired global consultancy GHD to find a potential fix for the sewage plant. Progress on that work, 5 months later, has not been disclosed by QLDC but they did tell us the contract price so far - $1,325,300.

Global consultancy BECA has already been paid for a similar study in 2023 with none of the advice apparently taken up by the council. The BECA report painted a picture of near total failure - with up to a five year fix - if a fix was possible at all.

Crux has been speaking this week with the chair (councillor Gavin Bartlett) and deputy chair (councillor Niki Gladding) of the council’s Infrastructure Committee and it appears they, along with Crux, feel that all of the facts have not yet been shared with them by council managers. And that’s putting it politely.

They certainly can’t tell us who at the council authorised an illegal wall to be built around the flooded disposal field in May 2024 - at a reported cost of $800,000 - and where the money came from.

It would be logical to believe that the council’s Infrastructure Committee would have had to make such a decision - or at the very least be told that the CEO or another senior manager had made the decision for them.

Enter Pinpoint- from the Google News Initiative.

The 21 legal affidavits from the ORC filed with the Environment Court make for formidable reading. So far we’ve picked out the occasional nuggets but a systemic analysis of the documents could take weeks or even months.

In partnership with the Google News Initiative we’ve uploaded all 21 documents to their investigative journalism tool Pinpoint this week. Within hours we could start to assemble a timeline of the sewage plant failure and see how the QLDC has failed to address or fix multiple problems that in most cases seem preventable.

Most alarming is the experience of ORC investigators who keep discovering failures that by law they are supposed to have been told about.

The two kilometre disposal field wall is just one example.

Pinpoint identified one meeting between ORC investigators and QLDC staff where it seemed like big (i.e. elected councillor/mayoral/community type) decisions were being made on the ground by unnamed staff with no clear mandate or authority.

The Google software found this exchange where the ORC had a meeting with unnamed council officials who are recorded as deciding how ratepayer money should be spent. The Affidavit is from Shelley Reed, ORC Senior Environmental Officer and relates to a meeting on June 9th, 2023 using the search term “ratepayer.”