Company to expand on dam benefits

The upper end of the proposed Ruataniwha Dam site, looking toward Dutch Creek, west of Tikokino.

The promoters of the Ruataniwha dam say they will be more "active" pushing their views on the environmental benefits of the Central Hawke's Bay irrigation scheme now that planning issues related to the project have been finalised.

But opponents of the scheme say its backers have been "spinning" its purported benefits for years and they remain unconvinced it will deliver the promised improvements.

The dam is being promoted by Hawke's Bay Regional Council through its commercial arm, Hawke's Bay Regional Investment Company (HBRIC).

HBRIC chairman Andy Pearce told a meeting of the council last week the company would be "taking a more active communications strategy from here on in" now that a board of inquiry had delivered its final decision on an environmental plan change for the Tukituki catchment where the irrigation scheme would be built.

"We have taken a deliberately non-reactive - some would say passive - but intentionally so, communications approach until the whole of the process of the board of inquiry was finished," Dr Pearce told councillors.

"There have been many provocative things said by other parties and we have resisted provocation."

Speaking at the same meeting, HBRIC chief executive Andrew Newman said debate over the dam had focused on the issue of nitrogen levels in the catchment's waterways rather than the wider environmental and economic benefits of building an irrigation infrastructure.

"It was always the intention we would deliver an environmental and ecological benefit to the river system through a combination of a plan change - tighter regulation - as well as using an infrastructure solution," he said. "That basic process has not changed one iota in this process. What has happened is that one partially influencing factor on ecological health has become the thing that's been talk about for the last two or three years."

"Our comms strategy around environmental/ecological performance will, you will see, start referencing heavily ecological health which is influenced by all sorts of issues - flows, sediment, riparian planting, water temperature. That's where mature debate should go on the subject."

But a spokesman for Transparent Hawke's Bay, Chris Perley, said one of the lobby group's concerns about the Ruataniwha dam was the amount of ratepayer-funded "spin" used to promote the scheme.

The council and HBRIC had been taken to task over their stance that phosphorus levels were a more important measure of environmental health than nitrogen.

"That was a complete public relations campaign and all the evidence we had was they were completely wrong on that was shown through the board of inquiry who said, no, you can't have a single-nutrient approach," he said.

"They have been doing public relations right from the start and from a Transparent Hawke's Bay point of view we don't trust their public relations because in the past that public relations has been shown to be incorrect."

Hawke's Bay Regional Council chairman Fenton Wilson said the council's focus had always been on improving the health of the Tukituki River and surrounding catchment.

"The message still needs to be put out there. People have become a bit numb to the conversation because it's dragged on for so long and there have been so many components of it which have been used in varying ways - accurately or not so accurately."

Mr Wilson said he did not expect an expensive public relations campaign.

"I think the message was that they've taken a few blows - some below the belt - and you might find that from now on they answer their critics with a bit more vigour."