The Natural Resources Access Regulator will be in the Casino region next month to check water law breaches.
Outreach officers will return to the Casino area in June to see if local landholders have addressed breaches on their properties.
Since 2022, outreach officers have visited 782 properties in the area to offer compliance advice and found that more than 22% of landholders had breached the rules in some way.
NRAR director of Education and Engagement Keeley Reynolds said officers would now return to see what steps landholders had taken to meet their obligations.
“By far the most common problem we found in this region was failing to keep accurate records of water use, but having oversized water works or metering issues were also detected regularly,” Ms Reynolds said.
“Of the 176 breaches we saw, 152 were related to accurate record keeping,” she said.
The effective management of water in NSW depends on accurately measuring water use – and keeping accurate logbooks is fundamental to that, Ms Reynolds said.
“Continued failure to comply with the water rules could lead to enforcement action, which can range from fines to approval suspensions and even prosecution for the most high-risk, significant cases.”
The Casino area falls into the Far North Coast Water Sharing Plan area which stretches from north of Coffs Harbour to the Queensland border covering an area of 10,000 square kilometres including 280km of coastline of NSW.
The information in this report was supplied by the NSW Government.
