Mr Cadogan said yesterday he would push for deadlines to be extended by four years.
The comments follow a report describing the council as ''ill-prepared'' for the task.
An independent review commissioned by the council, and released to the Otago Daily Times, raised several issues with the way it processed consents.
The authors found the council unprepared to process the hundreds of 100-year-old water permits which need to be converted to consents by 2021.
Council staff and its chairman have said it learned from the report, was making changes and was confident it could meet the deadline.
Mr Cadogan said he was ''deeply concerned'', ''deeply disturbed'' and ''troubled'' by the revelations.
The deadline was only two years away but parties were ''a long, long way away'' from being able do the process properly.
''And this is something this community and council can't afford to not do properly.''
He said in a Central Otago District Council meeting yesterday he was trying to take the lead in pushing the deadline to 2025.
When asked after the meeting what that entailed, Mr Cadogan said he would ''wait and see'' what the reaction was to his call before deciding what to do next.
The data and information required was ''not anywhere near being ready'', and his concerns were shared by many stakeholders, he said.
The regional council needed to think about whether it should now release the review publicly, Mr Cadogan said.
Otago Water Resource Users Group Manuherikia sub-group chairman Gary Kelliher said he was ''very, very concerned'' by the findings.
He had not seen any improvements by the council recently that would change the findings.
The first thing it needed to do was try to retain staff, he said.
The review said the council was identifying the Department of Conservation, Fish & Game, and iwi as affected parties in any given consent and negotiating conditions with those bodies, which came ''dangerously close to being an unlawful delegation'' of the council's statutory powers.
Mr Kelliher said this outlined something his group was ''putting up with all the time''.
''I think the ORC needs to be understanding of a larger range of the community.''
Otago Fish & Game environmental officer Nigel Paragreen said the findings of the review were very concerning, but ''not particularly surprising''.
''Resources are going to be stretched all around and a number of organisations are hiring people. I hope ORC will be too.''
However, it was perhaps a positive the council commissioned the review, signalling it wanted to change things.
''For years the ORC has not been doing much about it. At least we're going somewhere.''
He did not completely agree Fish & Game was always identified as affected parties on consents. However, he did recall occasions when those three organisations were identified as affected parties when other community members wanted to be heard, but were not.
WATER PERMITS
• All historic water rights that existed through old mining privileges need to be replaced with new consents.
• Many of the rights were ‘‘inherited’’ by farmers who now own the land which still holds the historic permits.
• They are now often used for irrigation.
• Applications for the new consents are being handled by the Otago Regional Council. Under the Resource Management Act, all the old water rights will expire in 2021.
