"So you can understand the difficulty the public have in understanding how we could be giving 900,000 cubic metres of water [900 million litres] over here, and yet over here, out of the same aquifer we're saying 'no, you have to turn your irrigators off until the water in the local river gets above a certain level'," he said.
"The politics of this are impossible to manage because the public sees growers not being able to access water to keep trees alive and on the other hand they see us giving this allocation of water for bottling and sending off to China. That doesn't make any logical sense at all."
The council's resource management group manager, Iain Maxwell, told the meeting water takes were granted by the council under the Resource Management Act which was an "effects-based" law and did not allow for "picking winners" in terms of how resources were allocated.
"It works on the premise that activities are generally okay unless they are specifically identified as being prohibited - as long as effects are managed," Mr Maxwell said.
The council had the option to change its approach as part of a review currently under way into how land and water resources are managed in the Greater Heretaunga and Ahuriri area.
The catchment-wide approach to managing water and land will result in a change to the regional resource management plan for the area known as Tank - covering the Tutaekuri, Ahuriri, Ngaruroro and Karamu catchments, plus the Heretaunga Plains aquifer system.
"In the meantime it's first in, first served [for consent applications] and as long as it's reasonable, it's efficient, and effects are managed, we can't say yes or no based on a judgment as to what the water is ultimately used for."
Councillor Rick Barker called for council staff to prepare a "high-level paper setting out these issues so we can consider them".
Mr Barker said the first-in-first-served system prescribed under the RMA was put in place when water supplies were considered limitless "which is no longer the case".
