Boom’s Legacy: Q2 2009 and the Environmental Bill Coming Due

Briefing

• Near-shore water quality monitoring showed degradation in embayments adjacent to new resorts.
• EIA post-approval monitoring revealed widespread non-compliance with environmental conditions.
• Beach access corridor provisions absent or unusable at most recently opened properties.
• Last pre-crisis major resort openings coincided with first post-crisis assessments of cumulative impact.
• Scientists called for mandatory post-construction monitoring with independent verification.

The near-shore water quality monitoring data that was becoming available in the spring of 2009 from sites adjacent to north coast resort developments that had opened in the preceding two years showed a pattern that was consistent across multiple embayments: elevated nutrient levels, increased turbidity, and in some cases measurable changes in benthic community composition compared to the baseline surveys conducted before construction began. The changes were not catastrophic — the near-shore waters were not biologically dead — but they were measurable and directionally negative, and they occurred within the timeframe and in the geographic area where the resort developments that had caused them were operating.

The EIA post-approval monitoring data — the records of whether the environmental conditions attached to development approvals were being complied with in the years after opening — was harder to assemble than the water quality data, because the monitoring itself had been inconsistent and the records were distributed across multiple agencies and applicants. But the picture that emerged from the documentation that was available was clear: the conditions that had been attached to approvals to mitigate environmental impacts — wastewater treatment specifications, stormwater management requirements, setback maintenance obligations — were being complied with in full at a minority of properties and partially or not at all at the majority.

The Access Corridor Inventory

The beach access corridor inventory that NEPA was assembling in 2009 as part of the compliance assessment that would eventually be formalised in the 2010 audit confirmed what advocates had been asserting for years: the resorts that had opened during the boom years had, with very few exceptions, not provided the public access corridors that their approvals required. Some had never constructed them at all. Others had constructed nominal corridors that were so poorly signed, so badly maintained, and so effectively obscured by resort landscaping that they were functionally inaccessible. The legal requirement existed in the approval documents; its physical embodiment did not exist on the ground.

The Independent Monitoring Argument

The scientists who called for mandatory post-construction monitoring with independent verification were responding to a specific structural problem: under the existing regime, the environmental monitoring that was supposed to track compliance with approval conditions was largely self-reported by the approved developer, and the independent verification role that NEPA was supposed to play was underfunded and understaffed. The result was a monitoring system that was as dependent as the Environmental Impact Assessment process itself on the good faith of the party with the financial interest in non-compliance. Independent monitoring — conducted by organisations without a financial relationship with the developer — was the obvious structural remedy, and it was one that the development industry had consistently resisted on grounds of cost and jurisdictional complexity.

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