This was well attended – perhaps 120 people from right round the harbour, generally very enthusiastic – but one has to wonder whether it achieved anything. The Manukau Harbour Forum Chair, Jon Turner, gave a good introduction about the slow pace of progress on Manukau Harbour improvement; but unfortunately few subsequent speakers addressed the challenges he raised.
Congratulations to local resident Paul Arthur for his personal award presented on the day for his contribution to Manukau Harbour catchment improvement, and to CREST and Manukau Harbour Restoration Society, which both have strong local connections, for their Awards for their work and advocacy.
As I wrote about in the May Greenie, Auckland Council is conducting a big exercise to create a set of environmental outcomes for the Manukau Harbour. Here was a brilliant opportunity to get more feedback from an interested audience on what the key issues are. This was one of the few times I have been in an audience where there were iwi as well as pakeha present and potentially contributing to such a discussion. (Auckland Council seems to deliberately set out to keep the two apart.) The opportunity seemed deliberately ignored.
Those attending heard a lot about what is going on in the catchment around the harbour, but very little about what is going on IN the harbour. What happens in the catchment of course affects the conditions in the harbour, but achieving the desired improved habitats, restored marine life, and improved water quality surely must be the clear final measures of the success of the strategy. Dr Megan Carbines from Auckland Council suggested we should see the latest data on water quality and seafloor ecology in the harbour published later this year.
The Council science staff directly involved are enthusiastic about the work and have produced an information paper – see https://www.knowledgeauckland.org.nz/publications/manukau-harbour-environmental-assessment/
But I sense that the Councillors and Management see it as of lesser priority, and have not provided resources to progress it as fast as it could have been. Given it is election year, this issue inevitably looks like it’s going to get kicked to the next Council, and the staff and citizens involved are going to have to restart the Councillor education process. There was a suggestion that the population of the Manukau Harbour catchment is just short of 400,000 – not enough votes, I fear, for the candidates to have the fate of the harbour at the forefront of their attention.
The proposed siting of the new wastewater treatment plant.
The Glenbrook Hall presentation on June 11 was, finally, a more professional approach from Watercare than some we have seen recently. The waste has to be treated somewhere. The decision to upgrade the two existing sites at Clarks Beach and Waiuku to improve the quality of the effluent and to accommodate the next decade (perhaps), and then (when needed) further expanding the Waiuku site to handle the whole load, seems to me to be a sensible solution. But it is expected that it will be 2031 before the improved Waiuku plant and its associated pipeline for treated effluent up to Clarks Beach, to the outfall, will be operational. In the meantime, the Waiuku plant will continue to discharge into the existing system in the Waiuku Estuary.
