Mark Peart: Panel thrown hospital pass

I don't envy the task of the Crown-appointed board set up to devise a plan for the allocation of water in the Waitaki River catchment in north Otago.

When Parliament passed legislation establishing the board this year, the six people later appointed were lobbed something of a hospital pass.

They are now immersed in a process which requires them to have released a draft allocation plan by February and a final plan by September.

That sounds straightforward on the face of it.

But it's anything but. As we are all only too aware, the Christmas-New Year silly season looms large, and within such a tight timetable that's a large chunk of downtime.

And, as far Parliament is concerned, the timetable enshrined in the act establishing the board is non-negotiable. This, of course, has Waitaki Valley residents hopping mad. They rightly contend that this is insufficient time for a reasoned and balanced plan to be developed.

The board's cause hasn't been helped by the inconclusiveness of a report released two weeks ago by Economic Development Minister Jim Anderton.

It is the final national cost/benefit analysis on proposals to take water from the Waitaki. It follows a draft released in June and incorporates public comment and feedback.

Anderton says it will provide useful information for the development of a water allocation plan for the catchment. It will be up to the water allocation board to decide how it is used.

There's only one large problem with that. The report's author, consultant Sinclair Knight Mertz, peppers its 224 pages with references to information gaps and a significant uncertainty in many assumptions.

The report claims to have developed an economic framework for the evaluation of proposals for water allocation. Yet, in the very next breath, it says the information it has used to develop that framework cannot be used to make recommendations on the merits of any resource consent application.

So, a vital tool the board could have used is not available.

Sinclair Knight Mertz says a lot of information has been identified which can support water allocation decisions, but it is generally in support of different parties.

There is certainly enough available information to support the information overkill principle, however comparable analysis is limited by inconsistency in the methodology applied by the individuals and organisations developing each specific proposal.

The report laments the absence of formal analysis of the catchment as a whole. Without integrated studies, the remaining analysis tends to be limited to sections of the river and focused on the impacts that might be associated with individual consent applications.

There is no single hydrologic model representing available resources in the Waitaki catchment, consented water takes and incorporating consent conditions.

Without such information, operational changes to the system by consent holders and supply security to existing consent holders cannot be compared with scenarios with new consents, the report says.

I flunked School Certificate science by a wide margin but this, in my humble opinion, suggests the board has a problem.

Clearly, analysis of water issues in the Waitaki catchment until now has been piecemeal, notwithstanding that Meridian Energy's Project Aqua scheme has been and gone.

Which leaves the water allocation board very much between a rock and a hard place.

The fact that the cost/benefit analysis considers water allocation in the Waitaki in the context of the most beneficial allocation structure for the wealth of the nation irks Waitaki residents big time.

With eight dams already lining the Waitaki River, locals feel they have given enough to the national interest and that their interests are first and foremost in the balance.

Project Aqua left emotional scars in the Waitaki which have yet to fully heal. That makes the board's task all the more difficult and unenviable.

* Mark Peart is a Dunedin-based freelance writer.