Lake Taupo consent rules to take effect next month

The Environment Court has now formally approved a new Waikato Regional Council policy aimed at protecting water quality in Lake Taupo, meaning farmers around the lake will need to apply for a resource consent to continue farming.

The implementation of the policy – known as Variation 5 to the Waikato Regional Plan – has been going on for some time, with a considerable amount of work already done by the council and farmers. However, finalising the policy has been awaiting sign off from the court following appeals by several parties who eventually came to agreement on the wording.

Now, following the Environment Court’s formal endorsement of the policy, the variation is due to become fully operative on 7 July. (Read on …)

Environment Southland will send copies of its compliance incident list to dairy industry stakeholders at the request of a councillor who believed they should be aware of the scale of the problem the council is trying to tackle.

At an environmental management committee meeting this week councillor Jan Riddell said the incident list provided by the compliance division showed about 50 per cent of the complaints were in response to dairy farming. (Read on …)

Waituna dairy farm manager Kevin Belling and his wife Rhonda Raymond-Williams have each been convicted and fined in the Invercargill District Court for four breaches of the Resource Management Act last September and October.
Two of the charges related to separate incidents where dairy effluent had ponded on their property after being sprayed from a travelling irrigator, and may have entered a watercourse. Another charge related to sludge and effluent from a concrete race flowing through a hole in a wall into a ditch, which fed into a tributary of the Waituna Stream. The fourth charge concerned dead cows being dumped in a hole in circumstances where they would have contaminated groundwater.
Mr Belling accepted responsibility for the offences and Judge Jane Borthwick fined him a total of $60,000 plus court costs – $20,000 and $25,000 on the charges relating to the failed travelling irrigator and $7,500 on each of the other two charges. Raymond-Williams, who owns the property and holds the resource consent for discharging effluent, was fined $1,500 plus costs on each charge. (Read on …)

Less than a year after being defeated by strong public opposition, the mining industry is planning another bid to gain access to minerals lying beneath the conservation estate, leading industry figures have indicated.

Labour MP David Parker yesterday said “senior” mining industry sources had told him they planned to seek an increase in the size of pockets of Schedule Four land, which may be used for mining related activities.

Under current law, miners could obtain permits to allow “interference” on Schedule Four land restricted to areas 10m by 10m. (Read on …)

Environment Minister Nick Smith this morning said new environmental protection laws dealing with New Zealand’s exclusive economic zone, much of which is earmarked for oil exploration, will come into effect in July next year.

Dr Smith’s announcement comes just a few weeks after Navy and the Police arrested protesters who were disrupting Brazilian company Petrobras’ exploration activity in the Raukumara basin which lies within the EEZ off East Cape.

The new law will make the Environmental Protection Authority responsible for issuing consents, monitoring and enforcement of activities within the EEZ which lies from 12km to 200km offshore and the Extended Continental Shelf, which extends beyond the EEZ. (Read on …)

Exeter Crown Court was told that records about the amount of effluent discharged into a stream from the company’s mill in Cullompton, Devon were falsified. The EA, which brought the prosecution, alleged that St Regis and the site’s technical manager Christopher Steer were involved in the deception.

The site, Higher Kings Mill, operates under a pollution prevention and control (PPC) permit. A condition of the permit is that St Regis monitors its own effluent treatment plant and reports the results to the EA. (Read on …)