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.