by Catherine Delahunty
The public has a right to know the degree of risk from contaminated sites and Councils alone cannot be expected to fund all the assessment work required. This issue has been highlighted by the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council informing 350 families in Onekawa Park that they may be living on a former dump site. The problem has also been illustrated by the Manawatu Regional Council saying yesterday that they have no timetable for investigating all the 100 possible sites in their region.
Without adequate resources the unwelcome news that you might live near a toxic site will continue to be a source of anxiety or denial. Instead of panic or blaming the messenger the public needs to know that a thorough assessment of risk will take place. For many sites the long term management plan for that site will be “do nothing”. For other more complex sites there will need to be in depth assessment, appropriate clean up and ongoing monitoring.
None of this should be the responsibility of the landowners who may not have seen it on the Land Information Memorandum (LIM) report attached to the title at purchase. Sometimes these potential risks are not listed on LIM reports and sometimes people do not buy a LIM report when they purchase. Either way the buyer did not create the problem. In many cases councils have some responsibility and so does central government for licensing dangerous chemicals. But some of the worst contaminated sites were created by the timber industry and the horticultural and agricultural chemical producers and users.
Rather than wasting resources trying to find single companies from the distant past to blame for pollution it might be a lot more constructive to share responsibility.
I am looking at liability regimes around the worlds to see if there is such a thing as shared responsibility and best practice.
The Green Party would like to see local and regional council receive support from Government and a levy on the polluting industries to assess and clean up contaminated sites If a national register with coherent information and clear pathways for assessment was created and costs were shared between the three responsible parties we might see an end to the to risks from these sites and clean green Aotearoa could be one step closer.
Published in Environment & Resource Management | Health & Wellbeing by Catherine Delahunty on Wed, September 9th, 2009
Tags: Clean-up, national register, Toxic Sites
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on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
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One of the big issues with the current system is that every property is ‘tarred with the same brush.’ Councils list “potential contaminated sites” based on historic land use – but with no actual investigation as to whether that land use actually created contamination, and the lists were created only after a desktop exercise in most cases.
For example, a property previously owned by the Railways is likely to be listed as a potential contaminated site, even though there were no acutally use as shunting yards, turntables etc.
Perhaps part of this investigation should be a requirement to remove properties from LIMs etc if no actual contamination is found.
And that was probably why Councils were reluctant to release this information. They had no proof that properties were actually ever contaminated, only that there is an unassessed and unquantified risk that it might possibly be…
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It is entirely wrong to saddle current owners/costodiams with the cost of reparation. Shared responsibility is therefore fair & right. I liken it to the ‘polluter pays’ principal, however if the polluter has passed on, in whatever sense, then all should shoulder the responsibility in some formulation of shared costs – current custodian/local authority/central Govt. (Taxpayer).
After all, future generations will be forced, by default, to share the cost of our current extravagent life-style even though by any measure of fairness the current polluter should be paying.
Trouble is future costs will fall dis-proportionately on those least able to pay ( the poor & dis-possessed ). Sort of like now where the innocent party, (current custodian ) is expected to pay so that all can RIPeace, uncontaminated by past wrongs.
Only my humble opinion – am I confused ?
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Bigblukiwi,
I agree – I just think that the burden of proof on local councils should be higher as well before they start keeping registers of sites – just saying land is potentially contaminated because of what might have been the past use unfairly penalises current owners – the value of their land drops when that potential is publicised, when in many cases there may not be any actual contamination at all.
Either way current owners suffer – having to pay where contamination is present or suffering financial loss by an untrue perception that it is when it isn’t
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