Five new councillors will be joining the table at Environment Southland after the close of elections on Saturday.
While special votes are yet to be counted, those already named as councillors in the preliminary results are unlikely to change given the gap in votes between those preliminarily elected and the next possible candidate.
Newcomers to the Invercargill-Rakiura constituency are Phil Morrison and Maurice Rodway.
Cr Morrison was a member of the Regional Forum, a community-based group that advised the council on methods to improve Southland’s freshwater quality, and a lead writer of the group’s report that contained 116 recommendations to council.
"I think the opportunity now is once the new council reconvenes and starts to put their mind to it, making sure that people understand that it’s not a set of recommendations that you want to cherry pick from, actually they are an integrated set of recommendations that all sort of connect to each other."
Cr Rodway was a regional councillor from 2007 to 2019.
"I just missed out last time by about 60 votes, and I was quite keen to get back on. There’s quite a lot of interesting work happening at the council at the moment with the recommendations from the Regional Forum."
Edendale farmer Jon Pemberton replaces deputy chairman Lloyd McCallum, who was on the council for three terms, in the Southern constituency.
An owner of two farms affected by the droughts and flooding earlier this year, Cr Pemberton said his biggest drivers were making sure the mechanisms of local communities that experience those climate effects are done correctly and approached sooner rather than later.
"We have a habit of central regulation almost trying to play catch-up a lot of time ... There’s been a lot of unintended consequences we’ve seen with that engagement around winter grazing and such, there’s been some things that haven’t worked."
In the Fiordland constituency, Paul Evans replaces one-term councillor Allan Baird.
Cr Evans said the biggest regional issue for him was water quality and making sure the local rivers don’t cause flooding issues.
"Because a one-in-100-year event seems to be happening every month at the moment."
Alastair Gibson was elected to the Eastern-Dome regional constituency, replacing David Stevens who retired after two terms.
He said it would be an interesting term with changes in environmental issues, water plants, consents for grazing, among other things.
"The long arm of government is coming down and affecting the governance of local boards, and you can name things that are happening there; the environmental and grazing issues, and all those sorts of things, are being generated from government."
"It’s really [bringing] communication back into back into the community, so you take the community with you."
Two-term chairman Nicol Horrell returns unopposed in the Western constituency.
He said it was sad to lose some of the councillors who had done a good job over the past three years although he thought the newcomers made up a very good council.
"I think when we sit down as a new council, we’ll have a good spread of skills and we’ll continue on — the faces might change, but the issues don’t change, and we just continue to have to work with them. But it’s always sad to lose hard working councillors."
Cr Horrell said he would seek to be chairman.
The inaugural council meeting will be on October 28, where the new council will be sworn in and the chairman elected.
By: Ben Tomsett
