Bulldozing through environmental laws

At a time when severe weather events are wrecking the environment, contractors on small building sites ignoring the rules are adding to the problem. Week after week the prosecutions are mounting up all over the country from building sites where illegal work is destroying the environment. A contractor fined for tipping truckloads of soil and rubbish, damaging native trees and causing slips on Auckland's North Shore. He's a repeat offender. A prosecution for discharging concrete into a creek, killing eels - also on the North Shore. Dairy effluent overflowing into a stream in the Bay of Plenty. The owners of several kiwifruit orchards convicted for illegally taking millions and millions of litres of water for irrigation. All recent cases, all pretty much under the radar, and all at a time when nature is already doing enough to wreck the environment.Today on The Detail, the Herald's property editor Anne Gibson talks to Sharon Brettkelly about the myriad of cases she's been digging up where land owners are bulldozing through regulations that in some cases, they just don't think apply to them. Her latest story is about an Auckland District Court case involving a Silverdale earthworks company which was doing work at a residential property in Albany, where there's a lot of native bush deemed worthy of protection from tree cutting, clearing, or any environmental damage. Tao Ma was convicted and fined $34,000 for work he and his former company Mender Construction of Silverdale carried out in 2021 - 21 without consent. "He told a council officer that he basically makes money from disposing of soil and fill, so he tips that on properties," she says. "What contractors like this do is they go to construction sites, they win a contract - Mender Construction says it's a reliable aggregate supplier and clean fill tip yard." But instead of paying a waste disposal company about $200 a truckload to dump, he illegally dumped material which included asbestos on a private site in Albany Heights, next door to a reserve, that he'd been clearing. He had consent to do some works on that site ... but he took out about 100 trees and the topsoil with it. "What happens then is the clay is exposed, and then there was some quite severe weather, and the clay started to slip and move. It was a big wide area of clay that came off that property, down a hill, and it was about 100 metres wide and went through a boundary fence."The land owner told the council she had asked him to stop the work, but he'd carried on. …Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details