I really feel for mayor Glyn Lewers in Queenstown given the week he has had. He is a good man who within a couple of days has had to put his town on a ‘boil water’ notice that will last for months, then declare a Civil Defence emergency following the heaviest rainfall in decades.

Weather events happen and councils all have plans in place for when they do, although as Mike Tyson said, “everyone has a plan until I punch them in the face”.

It’s the water issue though that hasn’t been planned for, and I’m absolutely not having a go at QLDC here at all, because it could have just as easily been us as them.

By way of background, Queenstown has had an outbreak of illness caused by Cryptosporidium, a nasty wee bug that can spread through contaminated water. As I write this, there is no proof that the drinking water in Queenstown is the source of the problem, but because it could be, and because it doesn’t have treatment measures in place to deal with bugs like these, the new water regulator has told the council to put the boil water notice in place. It has also said to keep it there until the treatment measures are in place, something that will take months and cost tens of millions of dollars.

I repeat, this is not a Queenstown-only problem, it could happen to Central Otago District Council (CODC) and the majority of other councils across the country. 

Some of CODC’s plants have a treatment system in place for Cryptosporidium, but not all of them.

So, how the hell did we get here?

Pre-November 2021, New Zealand had water quality standards that could be avoided by councils if it was shown to not be practicable to reach them. One of the reasons that was accepted by the then regulator (the Ministry of Health) for not meeting the standards was cost. Many councils therefore avoided the regulations by saying they couldn’t afford to reach them. CODC put the funding in place to do this over ten years in the 2018 Long-Term plan, but we haven’t got all that work completed yet.

In November 2021 though, the excuses stopped when the Water Services Act 2021 came into force which took away the ability to not meet the standards. This Act went through with cross-party support and came about as a result of several people dying and many suffering lifelong effects from a campylobacter bacterium outbreak in Havelock North in 2016. It is important to note that this Act is not directly part of the hotly debated Three Waters reforms, which are mostly about how to pay for this and other improved standards now or in the future in the water space.

The Water Services Act put councils and non-council drinking water suppliers on notice to bring their supplies up to standard, or else. Alongside that, it created a new regulator, Taumata Arowai, that has the capacity and the teeth to make sure this was done. It is Taumata Arowai that has put its foot down in Queenstown.

People are really unhappy about the situation in Queenstown, and I have had plenty of unhappy people ring me when we have issued boil water notices in Central Otago, and I understand why. But people are also really unhappy when their rates bills go up, and water treatment plants, pipes under the ground and so forth are expensive but not sexy things that people don’t think about until something goes wrong. 

And this is where the tension for councils sits, and not just in the Three Waters space. Do the right thing for tomorrow today which means putting the rates up or keep hoping for the best with what you have and suffer the consequences when infrastructure proves inadequate later.

It's the Devil’s alternative, right?