The Buller District Council wants mining company money earmarked to fix an old landfill diverted to a new flood warning system for Westport.
Entrance to Westport. Photo: RNZ / Tracy Neal
The council has been working with BT Mining, which is part of the Bathurst Resources coal mining company, to establish a Community Trust Fund to help with resilience projects in Buller.
Mayor Jamie Cleine said Crown funding through the Provincial Growth Fund had now been secured to fix the historic landfill at Hector.
He said the trust was not yet up and running, but the money allocated by BT Mining was available.
"I approached BT whether or not they would be prepared to consider this as the kind of thing they envisaged for the resilience trust, and they're quite happy for the first year's distribution to be used for this."
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Cleine said redistribution of the $155,000 was yet to be approved by the West Coast Regional Council. If accepted, it would mean that a special rating district would not need to be set up to help fund the new flood warning system.
He believed the community trust fund was about a month away from final approval.
The flood warning system planned for Westport was a recommendation of the Westport 2100 Hazard Planning Group.
Cleine said a focus was the Buller River and an evacuation plan, and an improved early warning system was needed.
"There's already a telemetry system - measuring things like river levels and rainfall.
"There are two or three stations further up the Buller but the new project is largely about putting in another one in a location currently not covered, and building a computer model that will analyse all of that data for river level modelling."
Cleine said diverting the mining company's first-year contribution was an "elegant solution" that would benefit a lot of people.
