West Coast Regional Council chief executive calls for more staff as goldmine delays bite
West Coast Regional Council chief executive Darryl Lew (L) and councillors Allan Birchfield (M) and Brett Cummings (R).
Photo:
LDR
The West Coast Regional Council has conceded it needs to take on more staff, after a raft of complaints about the time it takes to process resource consents, including some from its own councillors.
The council's former chair - and alluvial goldminer - Allan Birchfield released letters last week from a company distressed that its fledgling goldmine had been shut down, and its seven workers and capital put at risk, after waiting 17 months for a consent.
Council resource management committee chair Brett Cummings - also a veteran goldminer - has set out his concerns in a letter to West Coast Regional Council (WCRC) chief executive Darryl Lew, with a long list of questions about how consents are being dealt with.
Both councillors have criticised the council's practice of hiring North Island consultancy firms to process goldmine consents, alleging the planners involved are unfamiliar with the industry, ask for irrelevant information and delay the process by asking what Cummings has called "stupid " questions.
In his case, the wait has been seven months for what should have been a straightforward consent on Ngai Tahu forestry land, which the iwi had approved, Cummings said.
In reply to the councillor's questions, Lew said the council had received 56 resource consent applications this year, and half of them had been outsourced to consultants in Buller, Greymouth and New Plymouth.
Of those 28, two had been approved, 11 were sent back to the applicants because they were "incomplete" and the rest were still being processed, Lew said.
"Similar to the WOF process for a car, when deficient applications are returned, applicants are informed of areas that are required to be enhanced and they can then resubmit the applications for processing."
Of the remaining 28 being dealt with by council staff, 10 had been approved, one had been sent back for more information within the statutory time limit and 12 had been returned to sender as "incomplete".
The rest were still being processed, Lew said.
The council's use of consultants has increased, compared to the same period last year, the figures show.
Between January and April 2024 , the council received 57 resource consent applications - one was publicly notified, 51 were processed in house and only six outsourced to a consultant.
There was little difference in the fees charged to applicants - council staff were charged out at $185 an hour and consultants' hourly rates ranged from $140-192 - all plus GST.
There had been only two council consents staff employed in January this year, joined by a trainee in February, and their availability had been reduced by sick leave, annual leave and training time, Lew said.
Last year, there had been three officers on the job.
"To date, I haven't increased the consents team, however I do believe now is the time. More consents are requiring technical input and we are having more going to hearings, so this is impacting on resourcing, not to mention future demands like the fast track projects."
The council would prefer to use its own staff who had local knowledge, Lew said.
But it would be impossible to do away entirely with consultants because the volume of consent applications and workload was unpredictable.
Consents for alluvial goldmining were much more complex than they were in the early days of the RMA in the 1990s, the chief executive noted.
They now had to be assessed against a lengthy list of national policy statements and environmental standards, including Freshwater Management, Indigenous Biodiversity, drinking water, air quality, greenhouse gases, and management of contaminants in soil to protect human health.
"We await the government changes to these national instruments and the replacement RMA to see if this becomes simpler ... I agree it would be ideal to have consents and application forms as simple as possible. It is a challenge to have them reflect the law and remain simple."
In the meantime, the WCRC consents team was working on new application templates and more guidance for alluvial goldminers, and would bring a paper on this to Council on July or August, Lew said.
The council had complicated the process by trying to impose static conditions intended for subdivisions and septic tanks on alluvial mines, Cummings said.
"An alluvial site evolves as you work your way through it, so you'll start off with your pumps and your pond, and even your access tracks in one place, and as you move along, you move them along as well, but they're demanding maps and trying to include these all things as fixed conditions on the consent. "
Until about a year ago, those details were set out for the council in a separate mine work-programme, which was updated, as the site progressed, Cummings said.
"The compliance staff would have that and refer to it, when they did their inspection visits. They didn't try to cram everything into the consent itself - that makes no sense, when you're dealing with a dynamic system.
"If you move your pond, you're technically in breach."
Hiring more consents staff could help the situation, as long as basic issues were addressed, Cummings said.
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
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