05-05-2025
Sweetwater Project: Far North councillor Mate Radich wants judicial review
But the project has been dogged with problems, and it has now soaked up more than $17 million of ratepayer money, with council insiders saying the final cost is likely to top $20m, but the council denies it will reach that level. It missed two deadlines over the past two years, but water was finally delivered into the public water supply in February.
Radich has been critical of the rising costs of the project for several years and says he still does not know the full cost of the project.
Radich said he will speak to the rationale of the motion at Thursday's meeting and hopes to get the support of his fellow councillors for a judicial review.
'This has been dogged by problems from the very start. It's just going to add even more costs to this. And I still have not been able to get the full costs of this from the council, despite asking several times,' Radich said.
Last month the Northland Age revealed that the council and contractor face potentially big fines if they are found guilty of illegally discharging more than 90 million litres of groundwater into the Sweetwater Wetland.
The council and Ventia are being prosecuted by the country's top environmental watchdog – the Government's Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) under the Resource Management Act (RMA).
Each defendant faces a charge each of illegally discharging abstracted groundwater within 100m of the Sweetwater Bore Wetland and two charges each of undertaking earthworks or vegetation clearance within a 10m setback from the same natural wetland. They have entered not guilty pleas to the representative charges – meaning they happened on more than one occasion – and the matter will be back before the court on June 13. The maximum penalties for the offences are a fine of no more than $600,000. Far North District Council's Sweetwater Aquifer project has been dogged with problems since it started. Now a councillor wants a judicial review of the project.
Radich was not surprised at the court case, saying it would add yet more costs to the project that he believed were already well out of control.
He now needs the majority of councillors to support his notice of motion to start the judicial review process. What is a judicial review?
A judicial review is where a judge is asked to review an action or a decision that has been made under a legal power.
The judge looks at whether the way the decision was made was in accordance with the law. The judge won't usually decide whether the decision was the 'right' decision. Judicial reviews are important in New Zealand law to make sure the Government and government agencies act within the law, fairly and reasonably.
Judicial reviews are always heard in the High Court. About 180 judicial reviews are heard each year. Only a person affected by a decision can apply for a judicial review. The respondent (the other side) is the person or government agency that made the decision which is being challenged.
For a judicial review to be successful for the applicant, the court will need to be persuaded on the evidence that the decision-maker did not lawfully follow the proper decision-making process.
