A Kaiata couple are upset the West Coast Regional Council wants them to remove pampas grass from their property.
Mick and Jean Culling love the tall pampas grass with its pink flower heads: it screens a large water tank and they consider the distinctive “cutty grass” as part of their West Coast heritage.
“It’s just a really huge display and it’s just amazing. We love it,” Jean said.
But it has officially been declared ‘pampas-non grata’ by the West Coast Regional Council’s bio-security team now enforcing the regional pest plant management plan.
Jean said she loves seeing the pampas grow wild along State Highway 7, through Kaiata and towards Greymouth.
So they were stunned recently to find a notice in their letterbox saying council has a “a beef about it”.
“We’ve got a letter of inspection from the regional council which said we have to remove it and destroy it.”
The news was wrenching.
‘It’s part of our history’
At the same time they had been informed wild pampas growing on the roadside opposite their property was to be sprayed by council — despite it being in an officially designated “no spray area”.
Jean said the pampas was part of the region’s landscape, going back many decades.
“It’s part of our history.”
Mick said if the pampas must go it would be on their own terms and he was less than impressed.
“It’s on private property and it’s got nothing to do with the regional council — and there is the joker spraying in a no-spray zone,” he said.
“If we have to take it out, we’ll be doing it in our own time.”
Council operations manager Shanti Morgan said the council had recently beefed up enforcing its pest plant control obligations under the Biosecurity Act.
Part of that was to directly advise property owners where an identified weed needed to go.
Morgan said the work was a statutory requirement for the council, based around a previously consulted regional pest plant management plan.
This had used community input and technical advice on the “key weeds” due the risk they posed to pastoral farming or aquatic biosecurity in the region.
A signal, not an enforcement
Morgan said council had two staff working to directly approach landowners where needed.
“If we can’t contact, they then serve an inspection notice.”
That inspection notice was “a signal” to property owner rather than about council going straight to enforcement action.
Morgan said the approach was “to educate people and find ways to minimise the pest plant”.
“Enforcement is not something that we want to do — we haven’t done it very often to date. We try to leave that as a last resort. We want to work with people.”
Morgan said pampas — native to South America — was an environmental threat to wetlands and the coastal marine environment in the region. It was commonly seen along road and rail corridors as well.
Controlling it relied on a level of cooperation because the rates-funded activity was limited for the council, although it was possible to advise and assist ratepayers on what to do.
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
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