Hamilton City Council’s campaign to raise awareness about how the city’s water services operate has led to an increase in community interest not just in water, but in how the city plans for the future. It’s also led to queries about how Hamilton plans to tackle the big issues, and what changes might be coming.

Maire Porter, Hamilton City Council Unit Director, Three Waters, says public interest is good, and her teams are proud of the job they do delivering high quality water and wastewater services for 180,000 people, every hour of every day.

“Most people take these services for granted, and that’s understandable. You turn on your tap, you flush your toilet, and everything works. The fact it’s a bit of a shock when it doesn’t, shows just how much we all rely on continual service, and highlights what a great job our teams do,” she says.

The campaign is attracting plenty of interest, with people able to sign up to be part of next year’s consultation on changes to water services.

“It’s clear people are keen to know more. I think people are realising just how complex our business is, and how many different issues and challenges we have to prepare for in order to continue to look after drinking water and wastewater in a growing city,” Maire says.

There’s a lot of drivers for change – the most obvious being new requirements and opportunities coming from Government’s Local Water Done Well policy. A small team has been established to work on Hamilton’s response, with Council decisions later in the year and public consultation planned for early 2025.

But as Maire says, any changes will simply be about how Council addresses its future challenges – it won’t remove them.

“At a high level it’s simple - we look after public health in New Zealand’s fastest growing city, meet all our regulatory obligations, and ensure we provide safe drinking water, high quality treated wastewater and allow capacity for growth.

“But in the detail, it gets very complex, very quickly.”

Maire points to the city’s response to climate change as one example.

“Climate change imagery means we often focus on sea level rise, melting ice and warmer weather. But for Council it brings entirely different issues. More intense rainfall can overflow drains that were designed for a different climate, and this rain water can get into our wastewater networks. We need to have new infrastructure to store some of this to avoid overwhelming our wastewater network and treatment plant with millions of litres more wastewater than they are designed for.

“Longer periods without rainfall increases domestic outdoor water use, putting pressure on our drinking water treatment plant. Longer periods of drought can lower river levels below the height of our fixed intake pipes for the drinking water treatment plant, meaning we can’t take water from the river that way. If river levels drop below the intake, we have to use a floating platform with pumps.

“Above all, we need to treat water as a precious resource so we use it efficiently, and stay within the limits of what we can use from the Waikato River.”

As Maire says, there are multiple responses needed by Council’s waters teams and planners to address potential climate impacts, and then there’s the many other issues the city faces. And it’s a massive business.

The city has a dedicated team to respond to unexpected issues. In the last financial year, Council received 1739 callouts for leaks, pressure issues or other non-urgent drinking water requests, and resolved them in a median time of 7 days. For urgent drinking water callouts their median response times was 38 minutes, with a median time to resolving it of two hours.

Hamilton’s got approximately 1500km of drinking water pipes and 900km of wastewater pipes. There’s over 130 pumping stations, nine drinking water reservoirs, six major pipelines on bridges and the city treats on average around 60 million litres of wastewater every day. At peak times in summer, the city’s single water treatment plant produces up to 100 million litres of treated drinking water every 24 hours.

“As government says, for many years, councils across the country have deferred some maintenance and investment on pipes and plant to try to keep rates as low as possible. Understandably, they have tried to get the most out of every pipe and piece of equipment, but this has led to a shortfall in investment and less resilience across the country,” Maire says.

“There’s also the issue of attracting and retaining staff. We have a great team, with more than 200 highly trained people delivering our services, but the industry is forecasting a future shortage. The waters sector has an aging workforce and we need to encourage new people in while retaining our experienced staff to mentor them.”

Government is introducing new rules to make sure the right investment is made in water services and that will mean some catch-up across Aotearoa, some more than others. Hamilton’s investment and planning over the years means the city is in a better position than some other councils but the challenges it faces are still large.

There’s been dramatic increases in Council’s costs. Inflation and increases in asset value have pushed up depreciation costs and the costs of maintenance and asset renewal. Insurance, chemical, electricity and gas costs have risen and changes to Government legislation will mean increased costs to prepare for, and meet, these standards. Because the cost of major infrastructure is spread through borrowing, the city is impacted if interest costs rise.

Government requires councils to present a plan on how they will manage future water services by September next year, and Hamilton City Council will be seeking public views on its approach early in 2025.

To sign up for consultation notifications and more information go to www.hamilton.govt.nz/dripdrop

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