Water restrictions won't stretch to ratepayers' sporting fields, says council

Thursday, 30 November 2017

Wellington City Council said it is required to water fields such as Karori Park for its summer cricket matches and ongoing maintenance.

Wellington is experiencing 'drought conditions', but the city council intends to keep watering its sports fields, public lawns and plant collections.

Public pressure has led to Wellington City Council cutting back its water usage, but it is not required to stop watering parks altogether – at least, not yet.

Wellington City Council says it will be conscious of its water usage but won't allow sporting fields such as Martin Luckie Park to die as the city faces 'drought conditions'.

Parks, sports and recreation manager Paul Andrews said it would explore other ways to save on water 'if the drought conditions continue', and the council had already cut back on its irrigation.

It would water by hand 'where practical', pause field renovations until autumn 2018, defer its annual 'building washdowns', set sprinklers for early mornings and evenings, and might stop or empty some of the city's water features.

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Andrews said the council wanted to be seen to be doing the right thing and conserving water, but it was a 'difficult challenge' to balance that against the future standards of its amenities.

'We require water to keep many sports fields, amenity lawns and plant collections alive.

'If we don't keep the grass alive, we face significant challenges down the track. We have to be sensible about it.'

Without water, sports grounds that had received a heavy investment of ratepayer money would suffer long-term effects, and would require added renovation costs to get them back to a playing standard.

'The fact is, without some watering taking place, it will have a major impact on summer cricket, the uses of our artificial turfs used for hockey that require water to play, and some of our premier playing surfaces that are used heavily over the summer for training and competition.

'The longer-term impact of a summer drought on our playing fields will be on the performance of fields next winter.'

The council's cutback on watering comes after Wellington, Porirua and Hutt Valley residents were told to stop using sprinklers from Wednesday – a day after utilities company Wellington Water foreshadowed a total sprinkler ban if water demand did not ease 'in the next fortnight'.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) said this month had been one of the driest Novembers in almost a century.

Andrews said the council would gauge how the city's water restrictions panned out before making stricter adjustments.

Features such as the Cuba St Bucket Fountain would be emptied only as a last resort, he said.

'We often get a dry autumn, but with it being so dry so early it's concerning, if it stays this way.'

While the council was a big water user, it did pay for the resource, and was conscious of its usage, he said.

About 40 per cent of the city's sporting fields are irrigated. Depending on the type of field, they are watered either nightly or every two to three days.

The last time the council made a decision to shut down its field irrigation, it trucked water from Karori rather than let the fields die.