FAQs

Waikato Regional Council manages multi-million dollar infrastructure assets that protect communities, schools, roads, farms and other vital resources. These assets also keep land draining freely in specific geographic areas to minimise risk to communities.

Flood protection and land drainage assets in the Waikato include stopbanks, floodgates, pump stations, spillways and channels. There are also over 90 individual land drainage schemes.

Specifically, the council manages 468 floodgates, 116 pump stations, 554 kilometres of embankments and 465 river management and catchment management assets, including dams, bridges, culverts, fences and more.

The Sustainable Infrastructure Decision-making Framework, or SIDF, is a best practice process for making long term infrastructure investment and management actions for the benefit of the region.

It enables decisions to have a greater evidence base, be more balanced, objective and holistic, in nature. Importantly the process captures and takes into account more-clearly articulated community values and provides clarity on outcomes and greater certainty for investment.

Over the next 50 years, the council expects to invest over $1 billion in flood management and land drainage infrastructure. A further $1.87 billion is expected to be spent on non-capital related costs, including ongoing operating and maintenance, and depreciation.

So simply replacing or repairing existing assets, as we have done in the past, may no longer be economically sustainable, affordable or workable, as it needs to consider a wider range of inputs, and the future state of the catchment delivered by the investment. As a result, a more innovative approach is needed to ensure we can remain responsive to the needs of communities.

That’s where the SIDF comes in, it enables the council, alongside communities, to make best practice decisions on long-term infrastructure investments.

The SIDF will be used to evaluate various response strategies and their impacts using drafted Strategic Investment Objectives and a multi-criteria analysis that includes economic, social and environmental assessments, and te ao Māori perspectives.

This approach enables impacted parties, including iwi, communities and stakeholders, to influence the outcomes of the SIDF process. Additionally, it will assist the council in understanding the requirements for its successful implementation across the region with the expectation that the SIDF will form an important tool in developing our 50-year Infrastructure Strategy and investment programme.

At the heart of the SIDF are a set of Strategic Investment Objectives that aim to clearly identify what we are trying to achieve for the region through our long-term infrastructure investments.

We have developed a set of objectives as placeholders in the draft framework:

• Flood protection and drainage services are provided in a cost effective and efficient way.
• Ecosystem services provided by land and water are maintained or improved.
• WRC makes investment decisions that reduce community vulnerability, risk and support adaptive responses.
• Remove barriers and enable initiatives to diversify economic activities.

These objectives will be tested with iwi, communities and stakeholders to ensure we’ve got it right.