The health of  Lake Wanaka and surrounding waterways had a reprieve at a full council meeting last Thursday.

Deputy Mayor Calum MacLeod gained the approval of the Council to develop a policy relating to the monitoring of freshwater bodies and that it be included in the Council's 10-year plan to ensure funding.

"Eventually the way we worked out to do it was external to the bylaw, and rather council developing a policy and getting it funded," MacLeod said.

“This is a big deal.”

There have been a dozen instances when drain water has been released into the lake, he added.

"Those instances have been inappropriate stuff like building materials into the system, and one was a blockage formed by a football where everything backed up.

"It's these inputs that the Council is saying we have to control and monitor."

MacLeod also mentioned that there had been e coli discovered in Roys Bay by a citizen science exercise which was discovered to have come from a cross-connection of a sewer pipe in the stormwater system.

"What had happened was several years prior, a new house was built in a subdivision up Stoney Creek, and the plumber had connected one of the toilets to the stormwater system, not the wastewater system. Luckily enough it wasn't a permanently occupied house." MacLeod said

"That was only discovered by monitoring the receiving environment, or we wouldn't have known about it. That's an input that we signed off, but it was an honest mistake."

There was also an instance where paint was released into the lake by a painter washing his brushes into the stormwater, he said.

MacLeod said the recently implemented National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management 2020 gave councils direction on how to manage freshwater under the Resource Management Act,

It said the health of freshwater should be first and foremost in council discussions and that Council should respond to any deterioration.

Unable to amend the Council's Integrated Three Waters Bylaw (2020) to include water monitoring, MacLeod persuaded Council to develop a policy to monitor local lakes and rivers and that would be included in the Council's 10-year plan to enable funding.

"We put in a final recommendation for the policy to monitor the receivables environment and we put that into the Long Term Plan," MacLeod said.

This policy would ensure that the proposed Integrated Three Waters Bylaw was complied with and the Council was meeting its obligations under the Resource Management Act, he said. 

"Simply put, what it is doing is getting the Council to monitor what comes out of our pipes so that we can then respond to any mistakes people make.

"We need to monitor and report annually on any deterioration. If we aren't doing this, we are failing in our directives under local government."

Read edition 1005 of the Wānaka Sun here.