Council has been planning for some time with the NSW government for various upgrades to our water extraction, storage and supply.

The extended drought and recent serious bushfires has reinforced the need to bring forward various options for our water security.

As a result, at last week's council meeting, we resolved to adopt several immediate and short term actions, while still continuing to plan for longer term improvements.

We will act immediately to expand the Wauchope Water Treatment Plant from 6 ML/day (megalitres per day) to 21 ML per day and commence a procurement process for this project.

The Wauchope Plant already has filtration capacity and can be connected to the water supply to Cowarra Dam and Port Macquarie.

Expanding the filtered treatment plant at Wauchope will allow more water to be extracted from the river during periods of 'high flow' when the river is still quite turbid and carrying a lot of silt runoff.

That will mean we are able to extract water much earlier after heavy rain and not wait for the river to naturally clear of silt and soil sediments before we can commence water extraction from it.

Desalination is also being considered through initial feasibility and investigation studies.

Desalination remains quite controversial because of costs, so council has decided just to begin with investigations into reverse osmosis desalination.

Once the initial information is available, council will make a further decision.

Apart from these actions, we will continue to work with the NSW government agencies on other short and long term improvements to the water supply.

This includes the possibility of wider use of recycled water from the Port Macquarie Recycled Water Plant.

Regarding water restrictions, we are pumping from the river when possible.

Level 4 Water Restrictions will be relaxed once the total combined dam storage reaches 48 per cent.