Two years on and Westport waits

An aerial view of the eastern end of Westport during the July 2021 flood.

Full details of how the $22.9m Westport flood resilience project will roll out have yet to fully emerge.

And on the eve of the two year anniversary of the July 2021 flood a process around the government's $22.9m funding announcement last month is now bound to a steering group under terms dictated to by the government, frustrating some.

West Coast Regional councillors were finally being briefed late on Tuesday after their meeting - although the council's chief executive Darryl Lew and chairman Peter Haddock have already stated they are strictly bound by a "confidentiality agreement" about how the package announced on 9 June will run.

Assisting home owners who cannot remain where they are, however, has been ruled out of the Westport 'support package'.

Snodgrass Road resident Ruth Vaega is very frustrated.

"It's almost the anniversary of the July flooding. No one has mentioned what is going to happen at Snodgrass," she said.

"It's stress, absolute stress. I just want to know what the hell are the councils going to do about it? We are really over it ... there is such uncertainty."

Residents, who have already waited for years, needed clarity to get on with their lives.

Many in Snodgrass are frustrated at the lack of open engagement about their futures, after being swamped by both Cyclone Fehi in 2018 and then the July 2021 flood.

And Vaega may not have time to wait.

She is dealing with a brain tumour and the uncertain future of her home of more than 20 years - let alone every time the stress brought on by rain falling - is only exacerbating the stress.

Heavy rainfall over four days from 15 July 2021 caused significant flooding from both the Buller River and the Orowaiti estuary.

It breached historic flood defences in the town inundating 826 properties and forced the evacuation over 2000 people.

In the following days 563 houses were assessed as either red or yellow.

After a week, the town had 71 red stickered homes and 384 yellow, while 108 were deemed safe to return home.

Out of 983 dwellings in Westport township 23 percent of the housing stock had to be repaired to be habitable.

Now Vaega and her partner Peter Graham are getting out, to a higher piece of land to the south of Westport where they hope to safeguard a future retirement home.

They raised their Snodgrass home following Cyclone Fehi in 2018.

However, the ongoing uncertainty since 2021 and the time the government took to come back with an answer on the $56m business case it sought of the local councils has been too much. In the mix, Cyclone Gabrielle has thrown up a whole set of new requirements for flood inundated properties with no clear path or timetable.

Vaega said she was sapped and they now just need to move on.

"We're going to get out of here - we can't sell it because we don't know what it's classified as.

"We shouldn't really rent it. We want to move on; we bought some land, we want to have some money to move on with our lives and we can't. It's just awful."

West Coast Regional Council representative for Buller Frank Dooley is angry about the lack of transparency about who holds the future for much of Westport under the 9 June announcement.

"There was a whole lot of announcement without any detail. We're still in wonderland wondering what the hell is going on here."

He and fellow Buller representative Mark McIntyre had been locked out of the process despite their statutory role as elected representatives for a council obliged to consult the public anyway, with the announcement rushed ahead of the budget.

"We're the local representatives - we've been totally excluded. It might be appropriate to be totally excluded (but) I don't know. I would like to know why."

He noted "overwhelming support" for an initial $10.2m regional council scheme consulted in late 2021. But the subsequent government invitation to put up a $56m co-funded business case and the resulting $22.9m announcement had delayed things, prolonging people's stress.

And as a result of the announcement there would now be "significant variations," Dooley said.

"What I'm saying is we've got to be very very careful to what we agree to, and how we agree with it because our ratepayers are the most important factor in the conversation."

Dooley said the predicament of many in the town remained the same as when the flood hit two years ago and he was very conscious of "the obligation" to work for the benefit of Westport's ratepayers and residents which he stood for when he gained his council seat last October.

"We cannot ignore our Snodgrass ratepayers. We have an obligation to protect them - that's basic.

"We may not be able to protect them all, so what are the options?"

He noted the new property classifications arising out of the North Island cyclones this year had now taken precedence but it also left more questions for Westport.

"They didn't have the calculations, they didn't have any agreement with the councils to say what cost they (the government) are going to front up."

Dooley said he respected the commitment of $19.6m in the package, that it had to be tagged with appropriate protocols to manage it.

"But we would just like to understand it".

Last week in a joint release, the West Coast Regional and the Buller District councils outlined details of what the $21.9 million support package can be spent on.

But the public interface between a steering group to manage the spend, convened on 23 June and the process for both the West Coast Regional and Buller District councils, who are obliged at a basic level to consult, is not yet clear.

That includes which residents will be caught outside the scheme, which the regional council will ultimately build and own on behalf of ratepayers.

The steering group was described by both councils in their statement as "a partnership" agreed to via government ministers "to progress the implementation of the funding".

Regional council chief executive Darryl Lew repeated last week that they are bound by the oversight of the Department of Internal Affairs for the scheme going forward.

This week he repeated hope that more detail, including how council would meet its statutory responsibilities to consult the community, would emerge soon.

Lew said he believed the terms of reference framework set for the joint steering group should become available to the public once it had met again on 21 July.

But with the General Election pending Lew expected broader implications for all flood projects meantime.

However, he anticipated a formal report to the council table about the timelines for all of the council's flood resilience projects including Westport soon.

In their joint statement the councils said the steering group was independently chaired and comprised key leaders from both councils, Te Rūnanga o Ngāti Waewae, Internal Affairs and the National Emergency Management Agency.

"The steering group will meet regularly to maintain oversight and synchronisation of the various packages of work that will be delivered by the respective councils."

- Local Democracy Reporting is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ On Air