Background information

A key part of supporting plan implementation is monitoring compliance and undertaking enforcement where required to achieve long term outcomes.

What we monitor

As well as monitoring both consented and permitted activities under plans, our staff also respond to pollution events and calls from the community when they’ve seen something having an environmental impact.

As there’s more than 24,000 consents to monitor, and unfortunately it’s not possible to monitor them all every year so the Council identifies priorities aligned with the Long-Term Plan that guide these activities.

We recover a large part of monitoring costs from relevant consent holders in accordance with our Fees and Charges Policy, and we also seek to recover costs we incur when responding to incidents.

Enforcement

We have several enforcement options to achieve compliance including formal written warnings through to prosecution. Snapshot reports summarising our compliance activities are available on our Monitoring and compliance annual reports section of our website.

As monitoring technology improves, such as telemetry* for water use data, we are able to monitor more with the resources we have available. We are also working to improve data systems to support our compliance monitoring work.

Sharing current state/progress information

When it comes to reporting, we have a statutory obligation to report back on certain measures – and also a desire to share current state/progress information in the areas we know are of interest to the community.

* telemetry is an automated communications process by which measurements and other data are collected at remote or inaccessible points and transmitted to receiving equipment for monitoring.