Hurricane Katrina and Cyclone Gabrielle

 What’s the difference between Hurricane Katrina and Cyclone Gabrielle? The answer is: wind speed and air pressure. But apart from that, what happened in Hawkes Bay in those deluges around the time of Gabrielle is a carbon copy, already for-shadowed, by what Cyclone Debbie did to Edgecumbe in 2017. 

I visited New Orleans 13 years after Katrina and many low-lying parts of the city were still ghettos. The Mississippi is the river that passes through New Orleans, and its stop bank systems have enabled huge areas of flat land to be developed for agriculture and to house those on low incomes. While I was there you could stand on the stop banks and easily see that the river level was above developed ground level when the tide was in. A bit like Amsterdam and its dyke system.

Stop banks are designed to keep the river in its bed, and prevent flooding. While Hurricane Katrina was stronger than Cyclone Gabrielle, most damage was caused by the same combination of high rainfall upstream swelling the Mississippi (and Hawkes Bay rivers) flowing to the coast, and the storm surge pushing upstream from the coast due to very strong onshore winds and the low-pressure weather sucking up the sea level. The net effect being river levels rise sharply, which is not a problem if the stop banks have been engineered to cope. 

While there are specifics that differentiate the 2023 Hawkes Bay floods from others - such as the amount of industrial forest detritus that got washed down and caused blockages - the large amounts of silt and the high water levels are what happens with unusually high rainfall intensities. Which are increasingly common in NZ as the Tasman Sea warms and cyclones move further south. 

The majority of the loss of lives in Hurricane Katrina was due to flooding caused by fatal engineering flaws in the flood protection system, called the levee, around the city of New Orleans. 80% of the city was flooded for weeks. The flooding also destroyed most of New Orleans's transportation and communication facilities, leaving tens of thousands of people who did not evacuate the city prior to landfall with little access to food, shelter, and other basic necessities.

Like Cyclone Gabrielle, Cyclone Debbie formed over the Coral Sea, but instead of tracking to New Zealand, tracked to Queensland first.  The storm caused A$3.5 billion in damage and fourteen deaths across Australia, primarily as a result of extreme flooding. This made Debbie the deadliest cyclone to hit Australia since Fifi in 1991. While Debbie lost energy in Australia, it headed back out to sea, building some energy and gathering water from the warm Tasman Sea, tracked to New Zealand, and made landfall.

It tracked from Taranaki, through Waikato to Bay of Plenty. Following heavy rain from Cyclone Debbie remnants, the stopbank protecting Edgecumbe from the Rangitaiki River breached on the morning of 6 April 2017. The town was rapidly flooded, giving residents barely minutes to escape from their homes. Insurance claims totalled more than $90 million.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is an agency of the USA whose primary purpose is to coordinate the response to a disaster that has occurred in the United States and that overwhelms the resources of local and state authorities. It has been in existence for almost 200 years and arose in response to fire and flooding primarily. Its role in New Orleans during and after Katrina was widely criticised leading to significant changes.

New Zealand’s equivalent is the Earthquake Commission – or EQC – which as far as I am aware has no involvement in the coordination of responses to cyclones and flooding. 

I think New Zealand authorities need to recognise the increasing occurrence of damaging cyclones, their randomness, their unpredictable tracks, and their devastating impacts when and where they hit land, and change New Zealand’s national, regional and local planning and flood protection infrastructure systems appropriately. 

Highly funded post disaster recovery systems may be necessary, but they are no longer sufficient.   

Water: Sense and Sensibility

I write on 3 Water Reform - again unpublished by NZ Herald - as a former Auckland Councillor and Regional Councillor now Mangawhai resident. This post focuses on the idea of co-governance....

After decades of immersion in Auckland’s centralised and old-school water, wastewater and stormwater solutions, I have found Mangawhai’s evolving approach liberating, receptive to new ideas, and locally responsive – characteristics that will be blocked by the Government’s blunt and brutal Three Water reforms.

Auckland’s Watercare is tipped to head one of the four proposed Three Water entities. Inevitably Watercare’s existing culture of centralised engineering, massive electrical energy consumption, and inefficient water use will shape that entity’s priorities – and conflict with the diversity of locally appropriate solutions that have and are emerging.

For example all Mangawhai buildings collect and store rainwater for use, reducing stormwater flows, and while there is a centralised wastewater system for denser urban areas, all of its highly treated wastewater is used to irrigate farm pastures and Council is expanding it to irrigate the golf course, while other decentralised urban conurbations have their own high-tech wastewater systems.

None of these outcomes are behind Three Water reforms which appear to focus on co-governance, central control, and infrastructure investment – all of which can and are being delivered locally already. I accept there are challenges and constraints, but there are other regulatory and funding support options at Government’s disposal to improve those outcomes, and which won’t throw the baby of local innovation out with the bathwater.

The amalgamation of Auckland local government in 2010, merged the different three water management cultures of Waitakere, Manukau, North Shore and Auckland into Watercare, and blocked emerging progressive approaches and local efficiencies. For example comparative bench-marking enabled transparent comparison of how each of these four providers charged for water, maintained water networks against leakage, and rewarded efficient and reduced water consumption at household level. Waitakere City Council led the way rolling out water efficiency measures. North Shore operated its own wastewater system enabling wastewater quality comparison across the region.

When all three water functions are merged under one umbrella the opportunity and drive for innovation and efficiency is lost. Auckland amalgamation and countless overseas water mergers demonstrate that operating costs balloon as large single entities develop systems and tiers of management to address the disparate needs and aspirations of diverse developments.

The Three Water proposals come at a critical time in New Zealand’s development as populations migrate from dense city living to smaller communities in Northland, Central Otago and Hawkes Bay for example, and where the appetite for local control, sustainable approaches and de-centralisation are part of the attraction and character.

The murkiness of the co-governance part of Three Waters is evident in the visibility and consistency of local maori opposition – particularly here in Northland. When water resources are managed locally maori views and interests are incorporated. Local Council structures already provide for co-governance. Three Water reforms threaten the diversity of maori representation, and rock the boat of existing local arrangements which aim to strike a balance and recognise not all maori think the same about local water.

For example, resource consents to take Waikato water for Auckland town supply, were initially resisted by Tainui which expressed strong cultural views against the mixing of waters. But this opposition melted away - at the eleventh hour – when Watercare offered Tainui a piece of historically important land on the banks of the Waikato.

The Three Water reforms are inconsistent with the sort of local governance and management that is required by New Zealand communities and all New Zealanders today.   

Hidden Cost of Three Water Reform

After 12 years Auckland Councillor; Watercare Shareholder Representative; Three Water specialist; and Mangawhai Ratepayer Representative, and other stuff - I wrote an OpEd for NZ Herald on 3 Waters.....

Here's the draft OpEd which wasn't published:

Government’s Three Water proposals risk costing the country more in the long run, hide from the public the true cost of traditional engineered systems, resist innovation which benefits ecosystems, and perpetuate century old flush and forget wastewater management.

For most of my last thirty years in New Zealand I have immersed myself in the economics, governance and politics of its sewage, stormwater and water supply issues, and I cannot understand or accept Government proposals to centralise our whole country’s dispersed and different three water systems into entities modelled on Auckland’s Watercare and hoping for the best.

Watercare was mainly formed from amalgamating the assets of Auckland’s four city councils, thus removing the comparative bench-marking which enabled ratepayers to compare the relative water and wastewater costs and benefits of the region’s service providers - thereby encouraging efficiencies, and instead creating a relatively unregulated entity with dozens of managers each earning salaries of hundreds of thousands of public dollars. Watercare’s focus on discharging treated wastewater to the Manukau Harbour and Rangitoto Channel has led to the development of an extremely expensive sewage collection network which leaks in freshwater when it rains (necessitating bigger pipes with a billion dollar price tag), which routinely overflow raw sewage when it rains anyway, and  whose demand for pumps and electricity makes Watercare Auckland’s biggest electricity user.  

Watercare is not a paragon of virtue or exemplar upon which to base New Zealand’s future. Barely a drop of Auckland’s treated wastewater gets returned to land, despite the environmental benefits and savings when there’s a drought, and despite international best practice. When Watercare sought consent to draw Waikato River water for town supply, it was only concerted court action that forced Watercare to treat the Cryptosporidium microbes and agricultural organochlorines that raw contained. And local Tainui cultural concerns that Waikato water should not be mixed with Auckland catchments was dealt with by the “gift” from Watercare to Tainui of a piece of prime land on the banks of the Waikato where a significant battle had been fought.

New Zealand’s governance experience with Watercare is much the same as is experienced with very large public water infrastructure entities the world over. They become laws unto themselves, their internal processes largely invisible, impervious to public opinion, and stuck in the past. This is unlike New Zealand’s smaller community-focussed three water entities whose performance is very much on display, where costs and processes are much more transparent, and which depend on the advice of New Zealand’s nimble, innovative and competitive engineering consultancies such as AECOM, BECA, WSP and Tonkin & Taylor.

These smaller local providers are all on the same learning curve and mistakes are made. Mangawhai’s Ecocare system – an innovative pocket treatment plant designed to replace leaky septic tanks and discharge highly treated wastewater to farmland – is an example. The urbanisation of developing parts of New Zealand does require local communities to incorporate appropriate three water systems into their planning and budgeting, but big doesn’t mean better.

Recent discussion about the costs of computerisation of the proposed four new three-water entities is just the tip of the iceberg of the eye-watering transition costs that can be expected – just look at Watercare setup costs, along with the wasted costs of investment in existing community systems. But the greatest concern is the loss of innovation opportunity that centralisation of three water services will bring, concretely exemplified in Watercare, at a time when advances in membrane technologies, local reuse and collection systems, along with climate change, point in the direction of community level governance, operation and ownership. 

Why is Central Government Reducing Local Government and Democracy?

 This is an OpEd piece sent to NZ Herald a couple of weeks ago. Unpublished. So here it is:

While it is concerning that all of Auckland’s and Northland’s mayors are resigning ahead of  upcoming Council elections, it is not particularly surprising given the unprecedented and unrelenting attacks that have been aimed at Local Government by the present Central Government and which threaten local democracy and community planning in particular.

Kaipara District Council’s Mayor Jason Smith has given the Three Water Reform which forces all Councils to divest public water assets to entities established by new legislation as his main reason for resignation.

That reform is the latest in a salvo of change striking at the very heart of what local governments in Western countries around the world are for, with New Zealand already near the bottom list for functions and responsibilities delegated to local government, lagging significantly behind Japan, Switzerland, Australia and the USA for example.

The previous National Government was the foundry for much of Central Government’s appetite and ammunition for local government reform. The Hon Nick Smith, past Minister of Local Government and Environment, championed the argument that Local Government development planning and infrastructure construction activities were the principle cause of the steep rise in house prices, and that reform was needed.

He argued that Councils were slow to release land for development, making it scarce and thus forcing up land prices needlessly, and inept at building necessary supporting infrastructure such as roading and water and wastewater networks, thereby driving up the development contributions fees payable on each new lot.

The reforms he led included several Resource Management Act changes requiring large councils to review District Plan documents and make property development less restrictive and quicker.

For the past few years Auckland Council has routinely published data showing that despite its new Unitary Plan releasing huge tracts of land for development, and the consequent yearly construction of thousands more homes than have ever been built before, house prices have persistently shown strong upward growth well before COVID supply line restrictions on construction materials.

The present Government has adopted this argument wholeheartedly, and it continues to underpin its plan of attack on Local Government, despite growing recognition and acceptance of the counter argument that the main driver for house price increases since the Global Finance Crisis is the combination of near zero interest rates, cheap loans and mortgages, poor returns on traditional term deposit savings unlocking that money and further increasing demand for housing investment assets, and few meaningful taxes on capital gains. 

In the last two years economists and policy advisers in Australia have accepted this counter argument, and, interestingly, recent and anticipated reserve bank base rate increases here in New Zealand are cited by economists as the main cause of reductions in house price increases now.  

But still Central Government’s local government reform machine grinds on with consequences for local democracy and communities.

Decades of careful community planning have gone into the District Plans that shape the way towns and urban areas develop, change and grow.  These have been tossed aside by Central Government’s Resource Management Housing Enabling Act which permits three homes, three stories high to be built on most urban lots without need for resource consent.

While this reform should produce more homes, some of which might be “affordable”, the impact of additional housing on infrastructure has been ignored. There will be more pressure on water and transport infrastructure which will require upgrading. This needs to be planned and budget provided. Increased density means more people using community facilities such as halls, libraries, schools, sports facilities, parks and reserves. These community concerns are built into local government plans, and are why local government exists, but they are ignored by Central Government’s edict.

While there is room for improvement in local government three water infrastructure provision, there are many informed reasons not to proceed with the current Three Water Reform proposals which very much risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Key among these are international trends away from centralisation of wastewater systems to de-centralised systems where wastewater is treated as close as possible to its source of generation. Considering the three basic components of a wastewater management system - collection, treatment and disposal – collection infrastructure costs account for about 60% of the total budget for a centralised system. Whereas in decentralised or more local systems, this component is reduced and focused mainly on wastewater treatment and disposal.

Local Government is ideally placed to be incentivised to work with its local communities, invest in new technologies, work hand-in-hand with local iwi, and build and operate efficient and sustainable three water systems that fit the local environment. 

Central Government needs to work in partnership with strong and motivated Local Government attracting the best staff and local representation to get the best outcomes, and deliver democracy.

COVID kills DOLPHINS

As a s.274 party I have just received a joint memorandum of the Environment Court recording that Panuku wishes to surrender resource consent CST60323353 authorising the construction of the Queens Wharf mooring dolphins and the parties request that the Court close its files.....

Such a good outcome for Queens Wharf and for Auckland - in my opinion.

Commercial Bay in a COVID context

A few days before official opening it was all go in the covered laneway that runs between Lower Queen Street and Lower Albert Street, and is where Queen Elizabeth Square used to be.

The public space is coming together - and those of us who walk through there each day to and from work will breath a sigh of relief. And look forward to other parts of this massive project to come to a conclusion.

But so much has changed in downtown Auckland. Years ago when all this was being planned, there was no COVID scenario. There was no "black swan" event that needed to be planned around.

So many assumptions made around the presence of wealthy cruise ship passengers drawn to Dior, Prada, Gucci and the rest, offices bursting with workers to such an extent there were projections of office space shortages, and thriving cafe and bar life providing opportunities for investment and more urban construction.

Even in lockdown level 1 Lower Queen Street and Queen Street itself is a ghost town. You could fire a cannon up Queen Street at 9:00 in the morning and hit nobody. Almost the same on the footpaths...

It will change. We're social animals and enjoy being out and about. But it will not be the same for a while. Social distanced behaviour has become a norm for now. NZ may be able to sustain this amazing COVID-free bubble it has become, but we all look at the news and we all know that tourists can't easily come, and we are infected by that, and find other ways to live and to occupy ourselves.

Auckland Water Shortages and Watercare

It seems like yesterday to me, but 1994 was a while ago. Auckland had a much bigger water crisis than we're experiencing now, and it was part of my political education. At the time Watercare was owned by the Auckland Regional Services Trust (ARST), having been put there after a hefty dose of central government driven local government restructuring. Parts of Auckland local government services were privatised - including its landfills. This was in the hey days of neo-liberalism. Regionally owned bulk water services and bulk waste water services were removed from Auckland's regional government (at the time a fresh Auckland Regional Council itself a cut down version of the celebrated Auckland Regional Authority), and placed in ARST, a sort of waiting room for privatisation. That was the birthplace and birth process of Watercare, and much of its institutional behaviour was designed then.

The water shortage came as big surprise to its owners and privatisation strategies took second place to addressing the water crisis. In 1994 due to an unusual roll of the political dice, Alliance candidates were the majority elected to the ARST, and as an active Green Party guy at the time, I was able to get, through my contacts, some Watercare information about what was happening...

This Watercare graph shows how the storage levels changed 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1994. The "normal demand management" curve 1991- end of 1993 shows the typical oscillation of dam storage levels from full to 75% of full. This is normal and to be expected when rainfall is normal. The dam levels get drawn down in summer and fill up in winter. But when there's a drought and the expected winter rains of 1993 didn't eventuate, followed by normal summer consumption, then, by May 1994 things were looking problematic. The graph projects water levels from June 1994, based on different levels of "savings" - up to 30%, and how many days before the dams would be empty.
 

A very well funded conservation campaign was run. (NB: As shown in the graph, Watercare had already run various media campaigns starting at when levels were at 60%, and then hose bans etc)

The main "customers" of Watercare - which then was a bulk water wholesaler - were the four city councils, North Shore City, Waitakere City, Auckland City and Manukau City. (This is before amalgamation). As the drought evolved, some Councils were more supportive of conservation than others. At the time, it was the Councils that metered water use, and charged users for their water. Not Watercare. Watercare charged each of those four councils in bulk. Councils used their water revenues to maintain local water network infrastructure. There was quite a competition between councils as to whose networks were the least leaky - water leaking from pipe networks is a problem the world over. One of the things that got lost when Watercare took over the retailing of water, not just the wholesaling, this bench-marking process has gone. It is not in Watercare's interest to check how much water is leaking from its network. It concentrates on metering what comes out of the pipes and charging customers accordingly.

At the time, Aucklanders were served by a robust NZ Herald with reporters who delved into the detail and understood much of the politics of what went on beyond the media statements.

As the crisis unfolded, about 10 options were canvassed for additional supply. At the time, taking water from the Waikato was at the bottom of the list prepared by senior planners within Watercare, but it quickly jumped to the top of the list when the corporate types who moved into Watercare at the time of the crisis, looked at it. Especially when the possibility of building an Emergency Pipeline got floated, complete with fast-tracking and RMA avoidance.
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Cartoonists had a field-day with this. Some Councils were all for the emergency pipeline, others were not so sure. And meanwhile it started raining...

Sometimes the pipe was up, and sometimes it was down. It was certainly an idea that appealed to the newly floated Watercare, for all sorts of reasons but the main one was that as a business it would be much more viable with a continuous run of river source to complement its lake storage. At the time I did accept that Auckland needed an insurance policy - a source that could be used when there was a serious crisis. But that preference should always be for raw water sources that were clean. And the Waitakere and the Hunua dams - being in bush catchments without agriculture or urban activity certainly delivered that.

I prepared this graph at the time of the drought (September 1994), which was after rain had been falling reasonably regularly - but not particularly heavily - for 10 weeks or so. It was designed to reveal just how negative Watercare's projections were (3 are shown). And at the time Watercare had got its teeth firmly into the emergency pipeline project. Watercare really wanted that project.
 

NZ Herald reporters - notably Philip English - followed the issue and developments extremely closely, and stuck hard to the facts. It was a matter of huge public interest.

This story is an excellent example of the reporting at the time. The Mr Cook quoted here is an example of the public relations investment that Watercare specialised in at the time. Since then Auckland Council and all Auckland CCO's have invested heavily in public relations experts and concentrated on spin-doctoring and managing and influencing public opinion. One of my major pieces of education through this whole period was that information asymmetry is a thing - that large CCO's and councils hold onto information that is not in their interests to make public. Anyone questioning local government - and especially CCOs is at an enormous disadvantage because of the lack of transparency around key pieces of information. Reports are routinely with-held etc.

I note the mention in this article of Ashton Wylie. He and I met after I ran some OpEd pieces in NZ Herald. He was a wealthy importer of Pansonic equipment - and passionate about Auckland's water resource. We got on like a house on fire and he funded me to seek expert advice outside New Zealand for expert evidence. He help me financially when it came to the Environment Court - see later...
 

This report is dated 28th September. I remember at the time phones running hot - people wanting to know "how much rain fell out your way?" It was knife-edge. Watercare was leaving no stone unturned and had mobilised a significant lobbying campaign in Wellington to keep MPs on side. And all funded with public money.

In fact the Emergency Pipeline project never happened. It rained enough and at the right time so that the Emergency legislation did not get a majority in Parliament. So 1994 ended well. But just as rust never sleeps, neither does a good project inside Watercare. considerable sums had been invested - of public money - in getting that project off the ground. Much of that effort was then directed at developing a proper Waikato based bulk water source, and sometime in 1997 Watercare notified resource consent applications to build a pipeline, a new treatment plant, and to take water from the  Waikato River and treat it and augment Auckland's water supply. Which is where the next part of this story goes....

One of the experts I found - and he came out to New Zealand - was Professor Dan Okun. From South Carolina, USA. He was profoundly expert and enthusiastic about the reuse of treated wastewater for non-potable purposes. I learned so much from him. His expert evidence was a big part of my evidence in the Environment Court. He knew a lot about cities in the USA that routinely reticulated highly treated wastewater for industrial washing, and golf course irrigation and suchlike. It gets reticulated in purple pipe networks. It's a whole network industry across big parts of the USA. Turns out also to be common in arid parts of Australia, and also in Japan. The diagram above is one I prepared based on Prof Okun's advice - mainly to show how 250,000 cubic metres drawn from a dam daily (equivalent to 250 million litres) - can be equivalent to a total supply of 750,000 cubic metres per day if you use the water three times before discharging it. It's simplistic - and doesn't talk about golf course and park irrigation (where water evaporates). 

Remember this all happened 25 years ago. And the discussion you get from Watercare today is just as ignorant and uninformed as it was then. Its business model, with a single network of supply of freshwater, top quality, used for everything, from drinking to washing out concrete trucks, all using premium piping, and all charged for at the same rate, used once, then wastewater treated to a "you can swim in it" standard, which is then all dumped. 
  

A key issue with taking water for drinking from the Waikato is the fact - at the time - there were almost 3,000 separately consented discharges into it. Farms, factories, geothermal, and sewage treatment plants. Contaminants that were most significant included organochlorines from horticulture, and cryptosporidium bugs from dairy farm sewage. These contaminants are not treated by the water treatment carried out on raw waters from the Waitakere and the Hunua dams. If raw water did come from the Waikato, it would need additional treatment.

I haven't published the full page advertisment that Watercare ran at the time. It showed a glass of water. The message was that the water would be the same. I challenged them at the Advertising Standards Complaints. Watercare - like Ports of Auckland - retain the best and brightest lawyers from Russel McVeagh. It isn't just about information asymmetry. Watercare has a culture of winning. Not just sustainable reporting awards (which are a travesty), but anything. Particularly where its reputation might be challenged. It's only public money after all.
 

Nevertheless the cartoons kept coming,and public concerns were real.

Watercare's resource consent applications were granted by the relevant TLAs - of course it was Environment Waikato that heard the application to take water from the Waikato, and due to the vagaries of the RMA, once water is in a pipe, the RMA is no longer interested in it. Many of us joked about it being "discharged" from taps and pipes into cups and glasses - but those arguments didn't hold much water....

You get a flavour from the above report as to how Watercare (and Ports of Auckland, and Auckland Council), can all throw piles of public money at public interest issues to ensure they win. But there was information and concern in the public arena about what was in the Waikato water.

This NZ Herald editorial summed up some of those concerns. Just a week or so before the Environment Court hearing, Waitakere City Council withdrew its appeal, and then so did Tainui (the Sunday before - it was gifted a chunk of land I think the site of a maori battle, by Watercare, which bought them off). That left Mr Hamilton and me as appellants. Not good.

But then I discovered that Manukau City Council had become a s274 party to my appeal. I was approached by someone and encouraged to keep my hat in the ring as they tried to work something though with Watercare. Manukau City is closest to where Waikato water would come out the tap, and had concern about water treatment. I learned afterward that Watercare was pressured by Manukau City council to sign the "Manukau Agreement" - this committed Watercare to including two additional treatment processes for Waikato water. One was a carbon bed filter - for organochlorines, and the second was nano-filtration - for cryptospordium.

This was a huge result. But went totally under the radar. If I had withdrawn my appeal, under pressure, Manukau City Council would no longer have had any standing in the appeal....
   

My second expert, funded thanks to Ashton Wylie, was Dr Perri Standish-Lee from California (I think). She uncovered the work of NZ's Dr Gillian Lewis and submitted her own arguments as an expert witness for my appeal. You will see reported in this article that I stood for North Shore City Council at the time.
 

Again, another positive NZ Herald report of how Watercare sued me (and Mr Hamilton) for costs after the Environment Court appeal. The gains won from the action were all in the Manukau Agreement already. We gained nothing more in the Environment Court.

So. What does all this mean now? Well - Watercare is bigger and stronger now than it was in 1994. There are no sizeable city councils to challenge it. Auckland Council has as much control over it, as it has over Ports of Auckland or Auckland Transport - ie little control. Watercare is very well resourced, and it's no surprise it is so impervious to challenge. It was designed and built by a chief executive for whom winning and the appearance of winning was everything. He was appointed in 2010 on the strength of this reputation to design the newly amalgamated Auckland Council. This is just as robust in the face of public concern and any internal dissent.

A major factor in Auckland's water shortage in 2020 is the monopoly structure of the responsible organisations, their focus on revenues, and their interest in delivering and funding a steady stream of large engineering projects to keep expensive and highly qualified project teams in employment.

Until those things change, and until there is a fundamental commitment to sustainability, including the reuse of recycled water for example, the widespread use of locally owned rainwater storage, and appropriately encouraged and systematic water conservation systems Auckland will continue to be vulnerable to weather and to opportunistic behaviours from its publicly owned water utilities.

When does Tiny House need Building Permit?

A two storey Tiny House was towed to this residential site in Mangawhai a couple of weeks ago, and since then the owner has been systematically preparing it so he and his partner can live in it part-time.

The planning question this sort of activity poses is when does such a development require a Building permit?

I'm interested in your views please. Use the comment facility of the blog to provide your suggestions - anonymously or otherwise.

This image shows the corner support used. A car jack on a concrete tile. The chain is wrapped around the trailer chassis beam, and U-bolted to a wooden post which appears to be set in concrete into the ground. The chain is likely to prevent the structure tipping in a strong wind. The site is elevated and exposed (see picture at end of this post). The elevation shown in picture 1 is to the north, and is about 8 metres long by about 4.5 metres high.

The same chain/post combination is deployed at the opposite end. Timber lengths are used to support the structure.

The wheels have been removed from the trailer supporting the structure, and axles protected with plastic covers from water and suchlike.

Electric power is provided to the Tiny House from this mains switch and electric metre board which has been built into one corner of the site.

The floor area adjacent to the elevation shown (to the south) contains the greywater drainage pipes from kitchen and bathroom which have yet to be connected to any disposal or collection system. I understand a waste pipe will be installed directing greywater into a storage tank located next to the retaining wall visible in the first pic (above). This will be pumped out from time to time. Unclear so far.

A freshwater tank about 2500 litres capacity has been set into the ground and collects runoff from the roof. It has no overflow discharge system as yet.

Kitchen and bathroom water gets heated here and reticulated into the Tiny House.

I understand there is a composting toilet in the bathroom part of the Tiny House. It is unclear whether urine can be passed into the composting toilet system.

Grey water discharge systems are not fitted as yet.

The locked cabinet shown by the trailer draw bar contains the gas bottle. The water pump is mounted on the timber platform at the left.

This view is to the East. The Eastern end houses a bathroom utility area at the ground floor, and a mezzanine level above for the bedroom which is accessed by means of an internal staircase.

So. All you experts and practitioners out there, what's the regulatory position on a Tiny House like this in a residential area? It complies with District Plan provisions. Fixture to piles, or connection to the local wastewater network, triggers the need for Building Consent in Kaipara District. But as it stands, would it comply in your neck of the woods?