Media Release

27 January 2015

Council Receives Abatement Notice

Abatement notices were served on Central Hawke’s Bay District Council this morning requiring them to take action to improve the quality of the discharge of wastewater from both the Waipukurau and Waipawa treatment plants.

Abatement notices are formal documents under the Resource Management Act and, in this case, are being used to direct the consent holder (CHBDC) to take action to meet conditions of their consents.

Iain Maxwell, HBRC’s Group Manager Resource Management said that this important first step in the regulatory process comes after CHBDC failed to meet the required discharge standards from the two treatment plants.

“The notices set out clearly what we expect CHBDC to do and the timeframes we expect it to occur in. We are pleased that CHBDC share our view of the desired outcome, that the wastewater standards are met as soon as practicable, and this step locks that outcome down,” he says.

“We acknowledge that both plants are experiencing technical issues that CHBDC and the plant designers had not envisaged. They are committed to fixing the plants and we want them to focus on that rather than dealing with a formal court based prosecution that would simply serve to delay the planned improvements to the plants.”

© Scoop Media