South Wairarapa Plans To Spend Almost $30m On Water Infrastructure

Tuesday, 3 June 2025, 6:16 pm
Article: Emily Ireland - Local Democracy Reporter

South Wairarapa District Council is set to spend almost $30 million on capital water infrastructure projects in the next two years, with all to be delivered in-house until a new water services entity is established.

Significant projects on the horizon for the council included upgrades to wastewater treatment plants in Greytown, Martinborough, and Featherston, pipe renewals, and capacity upgrades to enable growth.

The council’s Management Services Agreement with Wellington Water Limited was set to expire on June 30 but the council has voted to keep operational expenditure with the water management entity for another year and do its capital expenditure programme in-house.

This vote was done in public exclusion and the report has recently been released.

The report said the council would need to build a team to deliver South Wairarapa’s full capital expenditure programme for at least the next two years, however, the proposed Wairarapa-Tararua entity could start as early as July 1, 2026.

Over the first two years of the council’s 2025-34 Long-Term Plan, its capital investment programme totalled $10.85m and $18.31m respectively, the report said.

“The expected benefits of us managing capital expenditure in-house are anticipated to be more cost control, cost efficiency, on-time delivery, local contractor delivery, and optimisation of the programme leading into the new entity in which our forward investment programme will be a factor for negotiations,” the report to council said.

“The risks are that there might be some delay while we source resourcing, and this may impact on relationships with the community and the regulator, but this should be able to be managed with proactive and comprehensive communications.”

The report said the relationship between the council and Wellington Water had been “fraught” and councillors had voted in public-exclusion in December to exit the relationship with Wellington Water on June 30, 2025.

Councillors had instructed staff to explore options for interim arrangements, citing dissatisfaction with Wellington Water’s performance.

The report said the Local Water Done Well process had provided “additional impetus to consider an early exit from Wellington Water by SWDC”.

“Earlier exit carries the potential for upside in terms of both improved levels of service in the short to medium term, and for being better prepared for the transition into the new entity, if well executed,” the report said.

“There are also risks to an earlier exit including being able to procure sufficient resources to replace Wellington Water and the distraction from the Local Water Done Well transition work that managing an early transition could cause.”

In January, council chief executive Janice Smith and Deputy Mayor and Wellington Water Committee representative Melissa Sadler-Futter met with Wellington Water Board chair Nick Leggett and chief executive Pat Dougherty and gave them informal notice that the council intended to exit the relationship on June 30 but that this could be extended “depending on practicality”.

The report said council staff then requested information to assist with this transition but Wellington Water staff had been “disappointingly” slow to respond, “in part because our requests distract Wellington Water resources from other matters such as planning for the new Wellington Regional entity”.

Initially, council staff were asked to look at a full-service external provider option taking both operational and capital expenditure away from Wellington Water but councillors voted at the end of April to take back capital projects only.

At a Wellington Water Committee meeting on Friday, Dougherty said Wellington Water was working to transfer all capital projects back to the council by July 1 and was “starting to get systems in place to look at how we transfer responsibilities for operations and maintenance by July 1, 2026”.

LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.

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