Now, though, her silence on the matter is being questioned.
Ms Simmonds called on the council in March for a report into the "costs, benefits and implications" of its actions if the council ignored her advice not to notify its contentious land and water plan ahead of resource management changes signalled by the National-led coalition government.
It did — councillors voted (7-5) for a notification date of October 31 for the plan later that month.
Ms Simmonds has had the council report since May 15, but the new minister has yet to comment upon it publicly.
One councillor this week suggested cutting hundreds of staff from the ministry might not be hastening her response.
And her Labour critics said she was being left on the sidelines by her own government.
Before calling for the report Ms Simmonds warned the council that proceeding with its plan before foreshadowed changes to the national policy statement for freshwater management were made would be a "waste of ratepayers’ money".
Now, a spokeswoman for the minister said officials planned to provide Ms Simmonds with advice "soon".
"Once the minister has reviewed the advice, she will determine the next steps, including any further engagement with ORC."
"But I’m relatively unbothered as we have fulfilled our obligations as requested and can now continue to move forward with the necessary [land and water plan] work unless we hear otherwise from the minister."
Cr Weir said the council never "ignored" the minister’s advice.
Instead they considered it carefully and decided it was "ultimately untenable and risky, both legally and environmentally".
They noted the ministry said this week it was proposing to cut 303 fulltime jobs by July next year.
"I wouldn’t want to speculate on what is happening behind the scenes delaying a response from the minister, but cutting hundreds of staff ... cannot have helped," Cr Weir said.
Ms Brooking, who is MP for Dunedin, said it was "totally unreasonable" for the minister to demand a pause on the work because of an intention to review the national policy statement "at some unidentified point in the future".
There were some changes to the national policy statement proposed in the recently introduced Resource Management (Freshwater and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, but "these do not cause a slowdown of the plan".
A significant proposal in the Bill — to exclude the hierarchy of obligations within the national policy statement for freshwater management from resource consent applications and resource consent decision-making processes — would be "unnecessary" if councils already had plans in place.
"Because then the issues are addressed in the plan rather than at the resource consent level," she said.
"Ironically those changes are being made by different ministers and Minister Simmonds was not even on the press release.
"Meanwhile Minister Simmonds’ ministry is being decimated by budget cuts, and she used budget urgency to expand spending of the waste levy to anything environmental in an attempt to fill some of the budget holes."
MP for Taieri Ingrid Leary said it had been acknowledged Otago’s present water planning framework was "not fit for purpose".
The council had been focused on changing this and communities were well-invested in the consultation process.
"Squeezing the ORC to ‘rectify’ its plan is unhelpful and unfair especially when the Minister of the Environment herself has been deliberately sidelined by the government’s own process — her position made worse by recent budget cuts to her ministry.
"The audacity of this government to overlook the years of research, ignore community voices and attempt to subvert confidence in the ORC is deplorable."
