A community group set up to protect the lower Waitaki River will fight changes to a water allocation plan, believing it is being driven by bureaucrats to avoid a fight.
The Lower Waitaki River Management Society will make a submission opposing Plan Change 3 to the Waitaki Catchment Water Allocation Regional Plan, administered by Environment Canterbury. That was supported at its annual meeting on Wednesday night.
It is worried about the effects of lowering the minimum flow from 150cumecs in the present plan to 102cumecs for summer months, the environmental impacts and how the river and braids will look after a period at the lower flow.
The society felt the change was being driven by the ''bureaucrats who want to avoid a legal stoush with irrigators''.
This was not a sound reason to radically change the key parameter - the minimum flow - in the allocation plan.
It also contested flow figures used to justify the change and, therefore, the level of hardship for Meridian to make extra water available under the plan, although not until 2025, for reliable irrigation.
The change had been formulated by Environment Canterbury's Lower Waitaki-South Coastal Canterbury Zone Committee which, the society said, had been disingenuous in publicly insisting it was not a lowering of the minimum flow.
The original plan was developed under special Government legislation, following a robust process involving wide community participation to proactively come up with bulk allocations to optimise the demands between national and local interests.
''That broad framework was to provide certainty for the future and avoid the mistakes we are making with endless piecemeal allocation - so this plan is not your average plan,'' the society said.
Abandoning the minimum flow was not democratic or well founded and opened the door again to the same old process of endless river degradation.
''It makes a mockery of the original plan process that they and the wider community put so much faith in.''
The society also questioned whether reapportioning up to 10cumecs from the Waitaki River to augment Waimate waterways was for mahinga kai, or to dilute the effects of dairy intensification.
The society encouraged all of those who took part in the original plan process to make submissions by August 22 to retain the original minimum flow.
Management Society
The Lower Waitaki River Management Society represents community and statutory groups. It was formed in July 2004 to promote community-based management of the Lower Waitaki River.
