Hamilton City Council (HCC) hold a comprehensive consent to discharge stormwater from urban areas to various receiving environments, including the Waikato River, its tributaries within the city and two shallow lakes. The comprehensive consent includes requirements for integrated catchment management plans (ICMPs), continuous improvement in stormwater management over time and for monitoring stormwater discharges and receiving environment health. HCC is also dedicated to protecting and enhancing the city’s tributary receiving environments and the associated gullies that provide the focal areas for the city’s biodiversity resources and values.
Tonkin + Taylor has supported HCC with its comprehensive stormwater consent since the late 90s. We firstly supported HCC through the co-ordination of environmental investigations and the preparation of consent application, assessment of environmental effects and stormwater management plan documents.
Since the consent was granted in 2001, we have prepared and implemented a comprehensive monitoring plan. The plan was initially focussed on compliance and targeted discharge monitoring to understand stormwater contaminant loads to the Waikato River. Our team undertook a comprehensive review of the plan in 2018 to refocus on receiving environment health, identifying trends, enabling adaptive approaches to monitoring and to provide clear feedback and data to support HCC’s continuous stormwater improvement planning and decision making through its Stormwater Master Plan initiative.
Our support to HCC’s stormwater programme involves the implementation of the stormwater monitoring programme including comprehensive urban stream and lake ecology, water and sediment quality assessments and comprehensive city-wide fish passage and stream erosion assessment and monitoring.
We provide the ecological, monitoring and geotechnical aspects of ICMPs and the Stormwater Master Plan that are used to prioritise annual, 10 year and 30 year on the ground improvement works programmes. This extends into integrated ecology, planning, geotechnical, civil and water engineering services to support improvement works projects including comprehensive gully restoration.
