Water services delivery involves managing three essential areas, sometimes referred to as ‘three waters’:
- drinking water supply
- wastewater
- stormwater.
The DCC is responsible for planning, funding, building and maintaining the infrastructure and processes that help us provide these services. This includes ensuring the services:
- meet community needs
- comply with environmental and quality standards
- address challenges such as population growth and climate change.
Our water services assets
We own and manage around $4 billion of water services infrastructure, including pipes, pumps and treatment plants. Under the in-house model, these assets will remain owned by DCC. Under the CCO model the assets would be owned by the CCO, and the DCC would be the indirect owner as sole shareholder in the company.
Ōtepoti Dunedin is one of the oldest cities in Aotearoa New Zealand and has water supply, stormwater and wastewater plant and pipe networks of widely ranging age and condition.
Historically, our city’s investment in replacing aging infrastructure failed to keep up with the work that needed to be done. As a result, like many other councils across the motu, there is a backlog of renewals work required on our water services assets.
However, we are one of the first councils to not only recognise this, but to design and implement a work programme that addresses the issue. We are well placed to deliver the planned work programme and can do so under current debt levels.
The term ‘reticulation’ refers to the pipes that convey water, wastewater or stormwater from one place to another.
