The real purpose of water meters – charging users more

Wednesday, 11 June 2025

Don Carson is former communications manager for Hutt City Council.

OPINION: A 100 years ago, Henry Ford famously said his Model T came in a choice of colours – just so long as they were black.

Wellington’s ratepayers have had a similar choice for their water supply future – water meters or water meters or water meters.

So it seems anyway. Mayor Tory Whanau can’t see past water meters and says WCC is committed to them.

Nonetheless, the recent postal consultation document simply avoided all mention of these devices. It was all about corporate structure.

Online, the WCC consultation site admitted water meters are “highly likely” for each of the three options.

The site claimed that water meters are to ‘assist leak detection’, even though Whanau has stated 4000 leaks were fixed over the past year – all miraculously without water meters to find them.

If we are concerned about water security – and we certainly need to be – then the water meter options do not help us one little bit.

A water meter cannot deliver one extra drop of water. A water meter does not fix a single leak.

A water meter has one purpose – produce data to impose a differential charge on residential water consumers.

Think where that has taken us with electricity price gouging in the periods of low hydro supply.

Two of the three Wellington consultation options proposed corporatising water delivery – in order, it stated – to access more borrowing.

Apart from kicking even more debt down the road, it sets up the loss of one of the last public-good assets we have left.

Some regions may not have a choice of water meters. Wellington does.

In 2012, Wellington’s councils were presented with options, starting at $145 million, to build a 5,900 million litre capacity water reservoir on the Whakatikei River in Upper Hutt. The councils chickened out.

We are now presented with collectively paying at least that amount to install and operate water meters, with - remember - not a single drop of extra water supply to go with it.

Projected climate change for Wellington is for drier springs and summers. The Te Marua Lakes will evaporate faster. The Hutt River flow will fall.

In panic, our new regional water entity will have to put aside time spent on having meetings pouring over organisational charts and taxi chits, and face up to the real world of acute and protracted water shortage.

In the short term, it will simply pump even more water out of the Waiwhetū (Hutt) Aquifer – potentially sucking in devastating salt water intrusion.

In the medium term, the entity will charge us again to dig a few swimming pools worth of ad hoc, inefficient, and insufficient small scale water storage.

The Whakatikei option, with its pros and cons, (e.g. hydro generation vs carbon construction footprint) should have been presented to Wellingtonians. We are grown up. We can handle it.

Of course, the construction cost would have at least doubled since 2012.

But that is nothing compared with the purse exploding $30 billion to be spent fixing enough leaks over the next three decades to keep all the taps flowing.

That is two-thirds of current total rates collected by our four councils – just for leaks. No wonder councils want them off the books.

No affordable pipe fixing schedule, nor any amount of corporate structural convolution, can avoid the day of water shortage reckoning for our region.

A protracted drought will not be pretty. Weeks, even perhaps months, of empty pipes and shiny new - but idle - meters.

Fire risk will skyrocket. Hygiene goes out the door.

It is not too late to put Whakatikei back as an option. A reservoir could deliver more than enough water to the end of the century for all of us.

Of course we would have to pay for it. But that would be paying for the water – not paying for its measurement.