Hawke’s Bay councils ‘gamble’ on urban development: Neil Kirton

Neil Kirton claims councils have learned little from recent flood disasters. Photo / Paul Taylor

Neil Kirton is a Hawke’s Bay regional councillor.

OPINION

A joint committee comprising representatives from Napier City Council, Hastings District Council, Hawke’s Bay Regional Council, together with mana whenua interests, have been working on a Future Development Strategy (FDS) for nearly two years.

The FDS is a statutory requirement for local authorities, setting out how urban development of Hastings and Napier will take place over the next 30 years.

This is a vital planning tool and fundamental for council decision-making on where houses and associated infrastructure will be built. The FDS is central to regional policy statements, district and asset management plans and council financial strategies.

Once included in the scheme, land designated for development enjoys legal standing, thus the importance of a proposed development being included in the FDS.

The FDS joint committee set new objectives, taking into account such things as climate change and other environmental and land use factors. The impacts of flood risk and the use of productive soils were obviously very high on the list of the updated planning objectives.

The joint committee’s new objectives rule out some land previously considered suitable for urban development. This included a controversial site at Riverbend Road in Napier where a 660 house development is being proposed.

At the lowest point in Napier’s flood control network, much of this land is at least one metre below sea level. Severe flooding has occurred at this location twice in three years.

Additionally, this site is a critical flood path, needed when the stormwater system capacity is exceeded in larger storm events.

Given that the Riverbend Road site was not needed to provide development capacity, as other sites provided this, and given the severe flood risk, the joint committee was asked to vote on removing the site for the FDS consultation document.

Despite such a clear and compelling rationale to exclude Riverbend Road, Napier City councillors voted to keep the site in the strategy.

The spectacle of “trading off” support for areas to be developed, effectively bypassing the agreed planning objectives and ignoring the severe risks to people’s lives and properties, is akin to a high-stakes game of poker.

Surely our councils have learned something from the disasters of the past four years. Planning and consenting failures and ignoring flood risk is something that the independent flood review admonished our local authorities over.

Planning and consenting decisions are now under scrutiny in the post-cyclone coronial inquiry. People died.

Residents of Napier and the region may well ask what on earth is going on here! What is motivating our council leaders to fall in behind questionable development proposals full of obvious risks?

Having rejected the agreed planning objectives, our local leaders need to step up and tell us what silver bullets are on the table to make future Napier South residents safe in their newly built houses.

Existing Napier South residents, badly flooded in recent years, also need to know how this major future residential development will affect their homes, given the wider impacts on an already over-burdened stormwater network.