Papamoa councillor Steve Morris successfully urged his fellow councillors to make haste and bring the matter to a full meeting of the council as soon as possible, rather than wait until next March.
"We have been talking continuously about this for the last five years."
The big-ticket items costing $2.5m comprised a series of public address loudspeakers along the coast and 26,000 in-home devices that operated on a dedicated radio frequency.
A report to the meeting stressed that the warning system needed to be resilient, with the council putting its eggs in multiple baskets.
Decisions were expected to be part of the council's 2018-28 Long Term Plan.
Mr Morris said he was conscious of the budget pressures on the council. He was happy to have a fixed public address system but was concerned about how much people would care for the in-house devices.
He believed people would regard the devices as free even although they were funded through rates. They would be forgetting to plug them in or raiding them for the batteries.
Mr Morris suggested the devices could be supplied on a user-pays basis to people who were extra anxious about a natural disaster, like retirement village residents.
Council emergency management and safety manager Paul Baunton said ongoing operational costs of the infill alerting systems would be about $450,000 a year.
Greg Holland from GNS Science underlined the importance of the council's initiatives. He said the national backbone system relied on the cellular network, with cellphone towers vulnerable to natural disasters.
Councillor Bill Grainger said feedback he had received was that Tauranga people were very supportive of air raid sirens.
He was told the Thames-Coromandel District Council was moving away from using mechanical sirens because of maintenance and reliability issues.
Sirens and loudspeaker systems were also less effective than in the past because of changing building codes that included double glazing and higher insulation ratings in walls.
New Zealand's three major cellular companies would have the technology in place by the end of this year for the backbone system. Email alerts were being phased out by Civil Defence in the Bay of Plenty.
Papamoa resident and roading activist Rick Hannay gave the council's new direction the ''thumbs up''.
''It is a positive. It would be unproductive to try and find fault in what appears to be a professional approach to a significant problem.''
However, he said it had to go hand-in-hand with ensuring that Papamoa East's roading network was able to handle large volumes of traffic if a tsunami was heading towards Tauranga.
Mr Hannay acknowledged that local councillors had fought hard to bring forward works so that the suburb would have more than the current situation of one road entering and exiting Papamoa East.
''I would be more relaxed if more money was spent on roading so that people could travel in and out of Papamoa East with ease.''
Roading infrastructure was still expected to carry a lot of people if tsunami alarms went off and they needed to try to avert massive traffic jams, he said.
Tauranga's in-fill tsunami alerting options
- A network of outdoor PA speakers
- 26,000 in-house warning devices at $35 each
- Installation 2019-21 at the latest
Effectiveness of disaster alert systems
Cell broadcasting: 84% effective (alerts & informs)
Mobile app: 83% effective (alerts & informs)
In-home device: 82% effective (alerts & informs)
Fixed PA speakers: 74% effective (alerts & informs)
Natural warnings: 66% (alerts)
Fixed sirens: 44% (alerts)
Radio 70%, TV 50%, web 50%, emails 10%
Source: GNS Science/BOP Civil Defence alerting review 2017
