Environment Canterbury has come under fire for the time it has taken to consider resource consent applications for water in the Waitaki Valley.
That was labelled "ineptitude" by Waitaki deputy mayor Gary Kircher at yesterday's Waitaki District Council meeting.
Environment Canterbury (ECan) in a recent Ministry for the Environment survey ranked at the bottom of a list of the time local authorities took to process resource consents. Recently, ECan announced it had substantially improved its performance.
Cr Kircher said that during recent council hearings in the Waitaki Valley, farmers had expressed frustration over how long they had been waiting - some, 10 years or more - to have resource consent applications for water heard.
As an example, Cr Kircher quoted the renewal of a water right for Otematata's water supply. The council applied for that in 2001 and it was granted earlier this year. He expected the council would have to pay ECan $40,000 in processing costs and another $30,000 for consultants.
The water supply was for a town of 450 people.
"What are you going to do? Deny it, and close the town?" he asked.
ECan should get on "and sort things out" so communities and people could get on with their lives.
Waitaki Mayor Alex Familton said that at a public meeting more than two years ago, the community clearly asked ECan to deal with three problems - the high cost of consents, the slow processing of consents and the lack of certainty of water supply for irrigators.
"It was, and still is, unacceptable to our community, with huge investments in production, to be faced with unnecessary consent and supply problems."
Canterbury's mayors had discussed various solutions, including setting up a central South Island region.
Mr Familton said these discussions were continuing.
On Monday, in Christchurch, an ECan panel started a 10-week hearing on more than 110 applications by 35 applicants for water above the Waitaki dam. Those had been on hold since the Government appointed the Waitaki Catchment Water Allocation Board in 2005 to prepare a water plan.
