Picking up the landfill challenge

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Gisborne District Council’s draft 2024 Infrastructure Strategy that recently came into the public domain brought with it news of a renewed effort to build a district landfill, and a plan to spend a further $6.5 million at the Kiwa Pools — a wildly popular community asset, but one that has already had $50m spent on it.

The plan to improve the recreation experience and safety at the pools, and $5.8m slated for GDC’s Waingake biodiversity project — which could be narrowed initially to protecting the water pipeline corridor — raise the question of whether the council is really focused on key infrastructure priorities in this special three-year strategy (they are normally 30-year plans) for cyclone recovery and resilience, at a time when needs are screaming out and funding is nowhere near as readily available as it was.

Picking up the landfill challenge is momentous, and once again it is strange to have this presented in bare outline with no public discussion about how the council arrived at this position. There is some history to relate, mostly thanks to Sheridan Gundry’s A Splendid Isolation: Gisborne East Coast 1950-2012.

Paokahu landfill opened in 1977 in rolling sandhills west of the city, and so began a sad saga of lease breaches and environmental abuse — including the dumping of 900,000 tonnes more than was allowed. A settlement was reached with the Māori landowners in 1998 that involved a payment of $2.2m and allowed the tip to be used through to 2002. It finally closed in June 2003.

In August 2000 the council announced its preferred location for a new district landfill — a forest block on Mander Road in the Waimatā Valley, close to the Waimatā River. An environmental engineering consultant said the site was risky and likely to be rejected because of its geotechnical conditions, but in February 2003 commissioners gave it the go ahead.

In September 2003 the council voted narrowly (seven for, six against) to buy the land. The sale and purchase process dragged on for the next four years, until the council reversed its position in August 2007 under a new chief executive and new engineering and works manager, with the latter and the project manager concluding the project was not financially viable.

The whole exercise cost the council $4.9 million (about $8m today), including $3.3m on investigating potential sites and gaining consents.

Since then much of our residential waste, reduced thanks to recycling, has been trucked 300km to a landfill near Paeroa (with waste from north of Tolaga Bay going to the Waiapu landfill). There are two Class 2 landfills in the district, in Ormond Valley Road and in Matokitoki Valley, that take construction and demolition waste, inert industrial waste and cleanfill.