However, four environmental and four socioeconomic criteria, as suggested by staff, will be discussed with mana whenua and used to produce a draft list of ranked water bodies for further development of remedial action plans.
Environmental implementation committee chairwoman Cr Kate Wilson used her casting vote (after a tied vote) to stop the committee from locking in what criteria would be used.
Cr Wilson said it was premature for the committee to recommend the council adopt criteria that was untested.
If councillors saw a draft ranking of degraded water bodies it would be easier to determine whether the criteria used was appropriate, she said.
Council deputy chairman Cr Lloyd McCall was among several councillors who took issue with the staff report presented last week.
Cr McCall said he could not buy into "untested judgemental criteria" for ranking waterways.
"The community is going to become confused and some are going to feel like they’ve had the finger pointed at them and some are going to feel like they’ve got a free ticket.
"We’re locking into creating a list and then we’ve got no background information on how we’re going to communicate that list to the public.
"We’ve got no information on how we’re going to mitigate the fallout.
"We’ve got no information on how we’re going to make the best use of the information to be able to get it accepted and updated within the community. "We’re taking a road that puts us above our communities and that’s not a road that I’m happy to be living on.
"What we’re doing is we’re taking a whole lot of arbitrary information and then we’re going to impose it on the general public without any testing, or without knowing where it’s going to lead."
Council chairwoman Cr Gretchen Robertson said ranking degraded water bodies in terms of the opportunities for their improvement was an important first step.
"This isn’t the sort of thing where you leap in and plant a whole lot of riparian areas and think that’s fixing the problem.
"You actually need to invest in research essentially to understand the problem really well, ‘what’s causing this?’
"And then, also, ‘what would the solutions be?’
"And that’s not a space a lot of regional councils have actually been in.
"We understand well the state [of the water], we don’t understand well the issue or the solutions."
Cr Bryan Scott argued for pushing ahead with the project; the council had already identified Lake Hayes, Tomahawk Lagoon and Lake Tuakitoto as priorities.
And recently in a workshop councillors had indicated a desire to grow that list of three.
"We need to get on with this."
The environmental criteria that will be used to develop a draft list are: the degree of influence the waterway has downstream, whether highly ranked riparian ecosystems are present, whether threatened aquatic or terrestrial species are affected and whether the water body is an "outstanding water body" or near an outstanding water body which it could affect.
The socioeconomic criteria to be used are: significance to mana whenua, community interest, cost-sharing opportunities and the scale of the issue.
