Questions are being asked whether the Otago Regional Council has a conflict of interest by being both rabbit compliance administrator and owner of Otago's largest pest control company, Regional Services.
The council has tightened rules on permitted levels of rabbit infestation, but when a compliance notice is issued against a landowner for breaching those rules and he has to pay for the work, the concern is the council will direct the contract to its wholly-owned subsidiary, Regional Services.
Ray Macleod, the manager of Landward Management, a Dunedin-based company which oversees weed and animal pest control, says indicative figures supplied by the council are three times the cost of operations his company has, after competitive tendering, contracted from other pest control providers.
The council figures were up to $80 a hectare for aerial applications of 1080.
"Those prices may simply reflect their [the council's] cost structure, not the cost structure of the industry in general," Mr Macleod said.
The council's director of resource management, Selva Selvarajah, said any potential conflict of interest would be managed carefully and the council would not direct farmers to any pest control provider.
Regional Services was separate from the council's enforcement arm, he said.
Mr Macleod said the potential cost of poisoning, along with greater compliance issues from using 1080, were reasons for farmers to treat pest control as they did pasture renewal or fertiliser application.
"Good pest control is an investment, poor pest control is a cost."
He said farmers contemplating 1080 poison operations to control rabbits this winter would find a much more complex and regulated process than before.
Part of that complexity, he said, was confusion about the extent and nature of compliance required of farmers.
The council's new Pest Management Strategy (PMS) which comes into force on August 1, required owners of land where rabbits exceeded McLean scale 3 to provide a plan approved by the council to reduce numbers, and they also had to liaise with neighbours so projects were done jointly, Mr Macleod said.
"If someone came to us and said they have had a compliance notice issued and can you design a programme, we'd look at the PMS and ask, what is it we need to put in this programme? It's not clear," Mr Macleod said.
"If the programme is compliant with the PMS and carried out to industry best practice, is there a requirement for regional council input if it is a permitted activity?"Mr Macleod said getting cross boundary co-operation for operations could, in practice, prove difficult to co-ordinate.
"The regulatory need to work with neighbours will be an interesting process, but who pays for it?"Landward Management biosecurity manager Graeme Franklyn said in most cases in Otago resource consent was not required for aerial poisoning applications, but under Canterbury's transitional regional plan, consent was required if there was risk of the contaminant getting into waterways.
As a result of the review of 1080 by the Environmental Risk Management Authority (Erma), any aerial application of the poison must be followed by a report to Erma providing details such as the area covered, how bait was cut, follow-up monitoring of targeted and non-targeted species, and water sampling.
Mr Franklyn said there were also tighter controls on how big carrots had to be cut, resulting in a 20% increase in waste, measures he said were designed for possum control operations, not rabbits.