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Have you had any trouble locating your street toby?
The Hastings District Council certainly had some strife finding Alex Sutton’s toby, when they visited his Southland Pl property in December 2022.
A toby is the water shut-off valve, generally located at the boundary of your property, that sits between the council water main and your private water pipe.
It allows the water to your house to be shut off - handy if you’re having some plumbing work done or if your hot water cylinder springs a leak.
So when Sutton found water leaking into his garage he went searching for it. He found a toby under a bronze plate near the garage downpipe which he turned off to stem the flow of water.
But because tobies are typically near property boundaries he figured there would also be one on or near the street.
He called the council, which he assumed, either via the property’s plans or by taking a look around, would know where the street toby was. But not even it could find it and a crew was eventually dispatched to install a new one.
So far, so good. Only that wasn’t the end of the story.
On Monday, water started bubbling up from beneath the ground in Sutton’s front yard.
He called a plumber and what should he find? The old, now leaking, “street” toby.
That now makes a neat little row of three tobies from Sutton’s garage out towards the street: the house one, the old street one and the newly installed one.
“I rang the council on Tuesday morning and they said ‘We missed the toby and you’re going to pay’. But in a nicer way than that,” Sutton said.
Turns out the old toby, which is roughly two metres from the new one, sits just inside Sutton’s boundary.
“It’s their bloody toby and it’s their leak, so why does a resident have to pay? I didn’t install it and they couldn’t find it,” said Sutton. “If they had’ve found it, that wouldn’t have happened. It’s all about accountability.”
Sutton says he’s “83 and I’ve had enough of being pushed around”.
In this instance, though, it appears he’s going to have to wear the cost of having the old, leaking toby removed.
The old toby, foreground, with the new one in behind. Photo / Paul Taylor.
He estimates, with the time it took and the manpower involved, installing the new toby would have cost the council $5000. Its response is that the “approximate cost of installing this new toby was $320″.
Either way, Sutton’s surprised they couldn’t find the old one.
“The toby the man was inquiring about was within his property boundary, but was unable to be located because it was buried,” an HDC spokesperson said.
“In response, a new toby was installed outside of his property boundary so that, in the event of future issues, council could get easy and efficient access to it without having to wait for permission to enter a private property.
“This is standard practice when dealing with historic issues like this where in some cases mapping that was done in the past may not be comprehensive or exact when identifying the location of tobies on private properties.”
Hamish Bidwell joined Hawke’s Bay Today in 2022 and works out of the Hastings newsroom.
