The Queenstown Lakes District Council is looking at new ways to deal with its under-pressure wastewater network.
The district council faced multiple fines this year from the regional council after a failure with the town's disposal field led to treated wastewater flowing into the Shotover River.
More recently, the Wānaka wastewater plant, known as Project Pure, had a mishap too.
New Queenstown Lakes mayor John Glover told 1News issues with the district’s wastewater facilities is "the gift that keeps on giving".
"As part of that process, having an extra capacity reactor, the sensible opportunity was taken to actually do some essential maintenance on the two existing ones," he said.
"For whatever reason, it didn't work as expected."
Glover said the incident led to "some surface ponding and some runoff from the site" and was followed by another abatement notice.
"It makes us look like we don't know what we're doing, and I know that's not the case," he said.
The council’s infrastructure operations manager Simon Mason said it was "really disappointing when things don't go as we've expected".
"Particularly when [the council] put all this effort into planning works and risk mitigations, and we still end up in a situation where we've got a treated wastewater that's exceeding our consent conditions and obviously leading to enforcement action."
New Year's festivities in the Southern Lakes is expected to place further pressure on the system, as flocks of people descend on tourist hotspots like Queenstown and Wānaka.
But as the town welcomes more tourists and permanent residents, the growth has forced the local council to come up with bold plans to fix and upgrade the wastewater system to keep up.
The council has worked out it will need to spend more than $1 billion on wastewater, stormwater and drinking water upgrades over the next decade.
"As we develop and carve up land, and if we're having to upsize pipes and put in new treatment works because of growth, we need to make sure we capture the cost of that from those that are causing the growth," Glover said.
Now, the council's renewed calls for a possible bed charge, or bed tax, as one way to pay for the infrastructure deficit.
"There's a lot of very, very rapid growth, which probably wasn't anticipated when we did our last plans," Glover said.
"Just in the last few months, we've probably had about 7000 new houses being proposed under the fast-track legislation, so they've never been in our plans."
Infrastructure NZ chief executive Nick Leggett said the council "is forced to only be able to fund what it needs out of rates".
"The truth is, we need to find other funding avenues to pay for infrastructure throughout New Zealand.
"Queenstown needs a bed charge."
But introducing the tax would only be possible if change was made at the government level.
Local Government Minister Simon Watts said the Government's position on a bed tax "remains unchanged – we have no plans to pursue one this term".
Leggett said he believed "about a third" of the pressure Queenstown's infrastructure was facing over the next decade was due to its visitor industry.
Glover added that he was aware of the challenge ahead.
"We will look at some different funding models as the water service delivery plans come into play with the new legislation the Government's enacted, which is looking at how we ringfence the investment and the charging for water and wastewater and stormwater," he said.
The council has run several community check-in sessions this year, with plans to do more in the new year to share updates on next steps.
Water NZ chief executive Gillian Blythe said towns could consider several options for wastewater treatment plants, including having one plant responsible for an entire area, and one plant with "some other smaller plant in different places".
"There is potential for smaller modular facilities to be built explicitly for a subdivision."
Infrastructure was not the only problem – future service staff on the facilities has also been highlighted.
"We have emerging concerns as existing operators reach retirement age that we don't actually have those people in the pipeline coming in behind," Mason said.
"It is a very expensive place to live, and it actually is a surprisingly difficult place to attract people to because of those barriers for people to live in the district and to find housing and – even across the nation – actually attracting people into water and wastewater careers is proving really difficult."
In the meantime, Mason and the council was working to avoid any more abatement notices.
"We'll take any lessons we can from when things go wrong to avoid those happening again."
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