An Environment Canterbury panel considering 110 applications to use water, mostly for irrigation, from the upper Waitaki catchment is running out of patience with applicants.
Pressure is now being put on applicants to complete a process which has lasted more than a year.
The Environment Canterbury (ECan) hearings panel chaired by Christchurch lawyer Paul Rogers started hearing the applicants and submitters in September last year.
The hearing was adjourned on May 3 for applicants, including three companies which want to develop 16 dairy farms with up to 17,850 cows in the Ohau and Omarama areas, to get together with planning officers and submitters to see if agreement could be reached on conditions which could be attached to applications, if granted.
"We were told the time period [for discussions] could range between four and eight weeks," Mr Rogers said.
The panel had been checking "on a constant basis" and had been updated on progress, "or the lack of it" on reaching agreement so the conditions could be presented all at once.
Where there was no agreement on some conditions, the panel wanted to know why.
It was critical the panel had the conditions before it could start issuing decisions on the applications and it had directed all parties to provide a report updating progress within seven days and when it was likely to receive the completed conditions.
It had now been about four months since the hearing was adjourned, Mr Rogers said.
The hearings panel - Mr Rogers, Kaiapoi environmental consultant Mike Bowden, cultural authority Edward Ellison of Otago Peninsula, and water quality consultant Jim Cooke of Wellington - sat for 13 weeks, with breaks in between, including Christmas-New Year.
They are considering 60 water and 50 associated land-use and discharge applications, some of which were called in by the Government in 2004 during the debate over the Meridian Energy Project Aqua power scheme so a Waitaki catchment water allocation regional plan could be prepared.
Once the plan became operative, ECan started to process the delayed new and renewal applications.
The hearing was bedevilled by controversy, ranging from opposition to more irrigation in the Omarama, Ohau and Mackenzie Basins "greening" the high country landscape, to claims of "factory farming" because three companies involved in the dairy farms proposed to house cows in cubicles for 24 hours a day from March to October and up to 12 hours a day from November to February.
