Sewage: QLDC Deputy Mayor and ORC Councillor call for halt to Queenstown development

Senior elected members take a stand until Queenstown's sewage is fixed.

Two senior and long standing local political figures have taken a strong stand against any future commercial or housing development in the Queenstown area until the malfunctioning Shotover sewage treatment plant can be fixed - and that could be five years away.

The comments came has Crux was told by the ORC that up to five additional infringement notices have been served on the QLDC in the past couple of months connected with the ongoing illegal discharge of effluent into local rivers. Crux has exclusively documented these ongoing discharges in multiple videos.

Deputy mayor Quentin Smith and Otago Regional Council Dunstan/Queenstown ward councillor Alexa Forbes have both told Crux today (January 17) that new housing and commercial development needs to stop due to the serious and ongoing nature of the wastewater situation at the Shotover plant north of Queenstown.

“I think clearly the infrastructure deficit is something that we need to respond to. When it's failing you just can't add to the problem until you fix it. I think we have to take some hard decisions and look at putting a suspension on new connections until we can get the plant working again,” the deputy mayor said this afternoon.

Councillor Forbes: “The growth has been phenomenal in Queenstown. We've now got some serious structural issues that we need to be examining and working through. This isn't happening properly at the moment. We don't yet know exactly what the issues are in their entirety or how they might be resolved. But we need to pause (development) so that we can have a look.”