Te Arawa Lakes Trust, the organisation responsible for most of Rotorua’s lakebeds, will cut staff as it scales back operations after warning it is on the brink of exhausting its operating funds.
The trust has blamed what it described as nearly two decades of systemic underfunding.
Trust general manager Tame Malcolm said 15 staff will lose their jobs in the reset.
He confirmed all field operations will be impacted, with freshwater gold clam monitoring, boat-user education, wetland work and the trust’s research unit being scrapped.
Catfish control and lakeweed management will continue, but at a reduced level, while some surplus assets will be sold.
Settlement assets, including Te Arawa’s lakebed titles, taonga and archives, will remain protected and will not be sold.
The move will reduce annual operating costs from about $3.8 million to $1.38m.
Trust chairman Wallace Haumaha said in a statement the changes were necessary or the trust would have run out of operating funds by early September.
“This is not a story of financial mismanagement, nor is it about blaming the people sitting around the table today,” he said.
“It is about fixing a system that has not adequately resourced Te Arawa to carry the responsibilities placed upon us.”
Established under the Te Arawa Lakes Settlement Act 2006, it owns 13 of the region’s 14 lakebeds.
It shares responsibility for lake management through the Rotorua Te Arawa Lakes Strategy Group alongside Rotorua Lakes Council and Bay of Plenty Regional Council.
Haumaha said the initial settlement to return ownership of the lakebeds was “hugely significant” but failed to provide an enduring source of supporting income.
“Te Arawa cannot be expected to carry the responsibilities of ownership and kaitiakitanga while having insufficient influence over the resources required to protect those taonga.”
The announcement came less than a month after a dispute over a proposed $2m reallocation of Crown lake restoration funding.
The trust wanted the money redirected towards Te Arawa-led restoration projects and argued the existing funding framework was no longer fit for purpose.
The proposal required support from both councils and ministerial approval. Rotorua Lakes Council backed it, but the regional council did not. The matter is due to return to regional councillors this month, with the trust invited to address the meeting.
Haumaha said the dispute exposed longer-term concerns about the trust’s role, arguing it had spent years operating largely as a “cultural adviser”. Meanwhile, the councils retained control of significant funding and operational priorities.
Councils and Crown respond
Rotorua Mayor Tania Tapsell agreed the trust had been under-resourced.
Tapsell said Te Arawa had entered the arrangement as a Treaty of Waitangi settlement partner but ended up losing that status.
She said her council had “strongly supported” reallocating the $2m and questioned the regional council’s opposition.
“It just bewilders me that they could not see the logic in supporting the Treaty settlement partners themselves to take on $2m of what is only $5m remaining.”
Tapsell also expressed concern about the impact the cuts could have on lake restoration work.
The regional council took a different view.
Regional council Rotorua catchments manager Helen Creagh said the trust had been an “active participant” in funding decisions through the strategy group and had approved annual work programmes under the funding deed.
Creagh said the council opposed the recent $2m proposal because it would redirect funds from long-term nitrogen reduction work in Lake Rotorua.
“This has been a core programme of work for the regional council and the strategy group for the last two decades,” she said.
She said the council empathised with staff losing their jobs, but that council-funded wetland restoration, biosecurity and lake protection programmes would continue either through the trust where possible or through alternative providers.
Māori Crown Relations Minister Tama Potaka acknowledged the trust’s environmental work in “restoring the health of native freshwater ecology” in the region.
He said the Te Arawa Lakes Treaty Settlement had included $10m in financial redress but, “unlike the Waikato River Settlement, no annuity payment was negotiated” between the Crown and the trust.
He said the $144m Rotorua lakes restoration fund was established separately from the Treaty settlement process and was provided to the Rotorua Lakes Protection and Restoration Programme.
He said the Ministry of Māori Development was engaging with the trust at a regional level where appropriate but was “not in a position to provide ad hoc, ongoing funding to post-settlement trusts”.
The trust is due to lead a review of the Crown funding deed and report back by February 2027.
The review will examine whether the roughly $5m of remaining Crown funding can still achieve its intended outcomes and whether changes to the funding arrangements are needed.
LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.
