Water Holdings Hawke’s Bay chairman Gavin Streeter confirmed the group had withdrawn an application to extend the lapse date on the Ruataniwha Dam consents to 2030. Photo / Warren Buckland
Water Holdings Hawke’s Bay chairman Gavin Streeter confirmed the group had withdrawn an application to extend the lapse date on the Ruataniwha Dam consents to 2030. Photo / Warren Buckland
Consent holders for the Ruataniwha Dam say the withdrawal of their application to have the consents lapse date extended will not mean the end of their efforts to see the project through.
Water Holdings Hawke’s Bay hold the consents for what was the Ruataniwha Dam and had made an applicationto Hawke’s Bay Regional Council in June to extend the lapse date on those consents to 2030.
They aim to create a similar water storage project in the same location, called Makaroro Storage Scheme, which they say could store about 100 million cubic metres of water.
Malcolm Miller, HBRC consents manager, confirmed the application was placed on hold and has now been withdrawn.
The Ruataniwha Dam, which the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council first began investigations into in 2008, was originally intended as a long-term, sustainable water supply solution for Central Hawke’s Bay.
The Supreme Court found in 2017 that the Minister of Conservation acted illegally by trying to make 22 hectares of Ruahine Forest Park available for exchange to Hawke’s Bay Regional Investment Company Ltd (HBRIC) for the $330 million project.
As a result, the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council voted unanimously in 2017 to move on from the Ruataniwha Water Storage Scheme and focus its efforts on other priorities after about $20 million of ratepayers’ money had already been invested into the dam, going on to sell the consents to the private group that became Water Holdings Hawke’s Bay.
Water Holdings Hawke’s Bay chairman Gavin Streeter said they had confirmed the consents expired in 2025, rather than 2024 as previously stated by HBRC.
He said that the extra time, the financial cost of the application process and advice they had received indicating that they had not made enough progress with the project to have their application accepted were all factors that led to the decision to withdraw.
“Under the RMA, you need certain aspects to be pushed forward a bit more, and one of them was the local bill, so there was no harm in pulling it down,” Streeter said.
“If we are going to incur a whole heap of costs, we’ll avoid it where we can.”
Gavin Streeter said Water Holdings Hawke's Bay is not giving up on efforts to get a water storage project running at full capacity on the site of the proposed Ruataniwha Dam. Photo / NZME
The Tukituki Water Security group highlighted the need for a local bill to secure access to the 22ha of DoC land that was the subject of the 2017 Supreme Court ruling, in a report for Central Hawke’s Bay District council.
According to Standing Orders of the House of Representatives, a local bill must be promoted by a territorial authority or a regional council.
Central Hawke’s Bay mayor Alex Walker confirmed her council has not yet been approached about promoting a local bill to allow the consents to be fully exercised.
“While I was involved in the governance steering group for that work, I want to be very clear that there has been no request to Central Hawke’s Bay District Council to initiate any process regarding a local bill at this point,” Walker said.
“Any decision by Central Hawke’s Bay District Council to promote a local bill would be significant and one made with wide engagement and consultation.”
Miller said the regional council had initially stated the lapse date of the consents as June 2024 due to wording stating “10 years following commencement of the consent”.
“The consents were first issued in 2014 along with Plan Change 6 but then the Plan Change was appealed (leading to changes to the conditions of consent) to the High Court taking a year before they decided matters,” Miller said.
“This allowed room for some confusion on the actual lapse date of the resource consents. We took legal advice on this and they advised the 2025 expiry date.”
He said this meant the consents were still valid for another two and a half years before they would lapse if they had not yet been given effect and they could apply for an extension again any time.
Trevor Le Lievre, spokesman for Wise Water Use, said he did not think an extra year was going to make a difference for Water Holdings Hawke’s Bay.
“You haven’t got a spade in the ground in the last decade, and now they are trying to spin it like ‘now we have got another year, time is on our side’. Well, actually it is not in the scheme of things.”
