Gerard Pain: Time For Plan B, C, or D for water storage

Gerard Pain

Will Foley (Talking Point, July 19 - Give Up Now and It'll Cost Us), Steve Wyn-Harris (NZ Farmers Weekly, July 17 - Region left on road to nowhere), and the people who have been writing letters and texting since in support of them obviously do not "take on board" anything people like me write to the newspapers about how there is MUCH more than just 22ha of "ecologically sensitive habitat for threatened and at risk species" that would be destroyed by the industrial reservoir that the former regional council was hell-bent on building in the Makaroro River.

That "ecologically sensitive ..." quote was made by Gerry Kessells from the firm employed by HBRIC to assess the ecological impact of building the proposed monstrosity. He started off saying about 185ha would be destroyed but got it up to 241ha by the time he spoke to the CHB Rotary Club in Waipukurau.

So Will and Steve and their supporters would you please now say "241ha" where you have been saying "22ha" in the past. DoC has a responsibility for all ecologically valuable land in NZ. Thank you.

Will and Steve had no doubt written their opinion pieces before Dr Amelia McQueen's Talking Point was published in this paper on July 15.

If they were to read her assessment of just the 22ha then surely they would accept that even the 22ha has more to offer than willows, blackberry, and barberry.

So yes the RWSS (in its present form) has, at the very least, been put on hold by the Supreme Court decision on the DoC land swap.

But the chances of HBRIC being able to get enough farmers to (re-)sign up to abide by the new environmental conditions is also an impediment to the scheme (in its present form) ever going ahead anyway.

And then there is the "little" problem of economics. At the meeting in Ongaonga when the regional council was "consulting" us on their intention to invest the $80 million in the project, Andrew Newman said the scheme would return a whopping 12-14 per cent per annum to the ratepayers.

Over the years that rate of return came back to 6 per cent but then only by HBRIC borrowing the money from the Port of Napier for about 20 years to achieve that.

Having gone from a plan to bleed farmers dry to one that bled the Port of Napier (and ultimately us ratepayers) dry does not make sense.

Also remember that the only way HBRIC was able to get CHB farmers to sign up was to offer them heavily discounted (= ratepayer subsidised) water prices.

Then add in all the unaccounted for costs that would come out of the "woodwork" in years to come.

So isn't it about time we started looking at Plan B, C, and/or D where farmers in all of HB could benefit rather than just a few in a small part of CHB.

For those farmers who do not see the future as being one where he or she learns to be drought resilient/continue with traditional low-risk dryland farming practices, but rather one where he or she needs to irrigate, then Will Foley (through Federated Farmers) needs to get those South Island farmers he brought to Waipawa a few years ago back here to once again tell us about the water schemes they as farmers put together - out of their own resources!

They can then build their own storage dams on land that is not as ecologically sensitive or as valuable as those 241ha up in the Makaroro River.

And they can avoid building them on major earthquake fault lines as well!

Gerard Pain is a Hineru resident and a former Central Hawke's Bay mayoral candidate. Views expressed here are the writer's opinion and not the newspaper's. Email: editor@hbtoday.co.nz.