Wellington sewage spill: Shortfall in pipe funding identified in 2020
Wednesday, 11 February 2026
A six-year-old report shows the Wellington City Council was warned as far back as 2020 about a water infrastructure funding shortfall running into the “hundreds of millions of dollars”.
The issue of water infrastructure funding – and who knew what when – has been thrown back into the spotlight after last week’s catastrophic failure at the Moa Point sewage treatment plant, which sent millions of litres of raw sewage into Wellington’s south coast. The discharge continues, now screened to remove non-biodegradables.
In 2020, then-mayor Andy Foster convened a mayoral taskforce to look into how the city’s three waters were managed. It was during this work that an accounting anomaly was found.
Each year, the council looks at how much water infrastructure depreciates in value and, largely through rates, funds that amount.
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It was meant to invest that money back into pipes but the taskforce found that $10 million to $20m a year was being diverted elsewhere.
“This situation was forecast to continue into the foreseeable future. Collectively this adds up to hundreds of millions of dollars of underinvestment,” the taskforce report said.
South Coast resident Eugene Doyle, who was on the taskforce, confirmed that the council did subsequently alter funding so all money taken from rates for water went to water. But it did nothing to address the decades of underfunding due to the mis-allocated funds.
“This is not all one mayor’s fault or one council’s fault,” he said. “This was out of sight, out of mind.”
Water infrastructure spending was again highlighted this week in a blog post alleging that, at a May 2021 vote, the council put $226m into cycleways and, at the same meeting, went for a substantially lower option for wastewater renewals.
Finance committee chairperson Diane Calvert commented on the blog to confirm it was correct but later confirmed to The Post there was “no evidence to support the correlation” of the two votes.
But she said the thrust of the blog was correct – that the council had underfunded pipes to the benefit of initiatives such as cycle ways.
Multiple sources confirmed that mayor Andrew Little reprimanded Calvert for her incorrect claims during a councillor-only session on Tuesday. Calvert confirmed the issue was discussed at the session but it was not reprimand.
Minutes and reporting from the 2021 meeting confirm the cycleway amendment was made after a motion by then-councillor Tamatha Paul but there is no record of the wastewater vote that day.
Actually approved that day was $187.5m for a library upgrade, $147-$208m for a Moa Point treatment plant upgrade (now the sludge plant) and $2.7 billion for pipe maintenance and upgrades.
Paul, now Wellington Central MP, said the argument that bike lane spending was responsible for the Moa Point failure “demonstrates both financial and logical illiteracy, as well as historic ignorance”.
“The same could be said for the $446m spent on housing upgrades, or the $187m on the central library, or $150m for sludge minimisation,” she said. “But that's not how council works.”
There was concern from council staff at the time about Wellington Water’s ability to deliver the work from any extra money for water infrastructure, Paul said.
Scrutiny over whether the council had been properly funding water infrastructure resurfaced in 2024, when a dry summer and widespread leaks raised the risk of taps running dry. The Post reported that Wellington Water had, in fact, been receiving more money than it had requested from the council since 2021.
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