The Minister for the Environment David Parker has declined the Hawke's Bay Regional Council’s application to proceed with a fast-track plan to change the way that nitrogen leaching is modelled on farms in the Tukituki catchment.

The Council had applied to use a streamlined planning process for a proposed plan change to update the ‘drafting gate’ for estimating farm-level nitrogen leaching – known as Table 5.9.1D.

This is used to assess whether farmers fall under restricted discretionary or non-complying activities for consenting.

No changes have been proposed to the nitrogen targets in the catchments nor the consent requirements that will be placed on farming operations in the catchment to meet the targets.

Mr Parker said in a letter to Council the application was declined because freshwater planning now had to be considered under the new Freshwater Planning Processes, under the recently enacted Resource Management Act Amendment Act 2020.

Regulation group manager Liz Lambert says staff are working through options for estimating nitrogen losses from farms for the drafting gate and will present these to the Regional Planning Committee on August 19, 2020.

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