South behind average for staff monitoring consents

The number of staff at Otago and Southland’s regional councils monitoring how natural resources are managed lags behind the national average.

The findings are part of the fourth annual report on New Zealand’s compliance, monitoring and enforcement (CME) activities, released this week.

The analysis, commissioned by the Compliance and Enforcement Special Interest Group (CESIG) for the regional sector of regional councils and unitary authorities, is aimed at measuring regional councils’ work to ‘‘inform positive change’’, a statement from the group says.

CESIG convener Alex Miller said the regional sector collectively conducted 64,122 inspections to monitor almost 50,000 consents during the 12-month period covered in the report.

There was a huge volume of work and the group considered the number of inspections to be a strong result, Mr Miller said.

There was no legislated or national target on the number of consents to be monitored.

Councils set their own monitoring targets according to the resources they had available and the types of activities that occurred in their regions, he said.

The 2020-21 report said the 32 full-time CME staff at the Otago Regional Council was below the per capita national average.

With just 71% of consents monitored the council was below the national average (83%).

Otago Regional Council compliance manager Tami Sargeant said the council had substantially increased CME staff resourcing.

The result (71%) was not as high as the council was aiming for, but it was an improvement on previous years, Ms Sargeant said.

The council’s long-term plan set a target for 2021-22 of more than 85% of programmed consent audits and inspections completed, rising to over 90% in the years after.

The council had also made major ‘‘process improvements’’ to make the work it did in consent monitoring more effective, she said.

It now had a more structured and co-ordinated approach to consent monitoring, focusing on the areas of highest environmental risk, and staff expected to see continued improvement in the percentage of consents being monitored as a result.

‘‘These improvements take time to bed in, but we anticipate a much higher rate of consents being monitored in next year’s sector report,’’ Ms Sargeant said.

In Southland, there were only 13 full-time CME staff, the report said, placing Environment Southland CME staffing levels similarly below average.

It too, at 72% of consents monitored, was below the national average.

Integrated catchment management general manager Paul Hulse said the council prioritised monitoring high-risk consents.

There were 5920 consents in total requiring monitoring, of which some activities were considered higher risk than others.

‘‘Environment Southland takes an approach that prioritises activities such as discharges, industrial land uses and water abstraction,’’ he said.

‘‘We have a very large land area to cover, with Southland being the second largest region geographically, so it’s important that we continue to prioritise this work, and encourage the public to help by reporting pollution where they see it.’’

Meanwhile, the report said in total, nearly $5.2million in fines were collected nationwide, which CESIG said offset some of the costs of regulation activities.

The Otago Regional Council issued fines worth $547,750 last year, all to corporate entities.

Environment Southland collected $51,250 in individual fines and $103,500 from fines to corporate entities.

hamish.maclean@odt.co.nz