Silt in a Hawke's Bay orchard after the cyclone swept through. Photo: RNZ/Sally Round
The government is putting $172 million into cleaning up silt and debris from Cyclone Gabrielle.
Hawke's Bay councils will receive just over $133m, with the rest, just under $39m, going to agencies in Tai Rāwhiti.
The money will be used to help businesses, residents, and Māori land owners remove material from their properties.
"Growers have been particularly badly affected and we've been listening carefully to them to work out how best to structure the assistance they'll need to recover," Associate Minister for Cyclone Recovery Barbara Edmonds said.
"At the same time, officials have been working alongside local authorities on funding allocations."
The funding would be given out by councils via grants with the first $40,000 funded by the Crown.
"Funding above that will be cost-shared on a 50:50 basis and capped at $210,000. Work that businesses have already undertaken through their own funding will be able to be counted as part of their 50 percent contribution."
Silt on a property in Gisborne. Photo: RNZ / Tom Kitchin
Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty said the funding will also ensure there is somewhere to put the debris once it has been cleaned up.
It was proving to be a complex and time-consuming job, he said.
"Councils can choose to use the funding to remove debris from residential properties, particularly if silt and debris is blocking access."
Agriculture Minister Damien O'Connor said funding silt removal was the next step along the way to helping orchardists and farmers re-establish their livelihoods.
Speaking to Checkpoint on Wednesday evening, Cyclone Recovery Minister Grant Robertson defended the government's presence in Hawke's Bay.
Robertson said he understood the communities involved were under a lot of stress. He said he and other ministers were in the area regularly.
He said while it was unfortunate to lose two ministers overseeing the region's recovery, Stuart Nash was still helping as an electorate MP in Napier, with Anna Lorck in Tukituki and Kieran McAnulty in central Hawke's Bay.
On giving cyclone-damaged homeowners a classification for their properties, Robertson initially said they would be provided in a few weeks.
They were working towards public consultation at the end of May.
"The wariness I have about that is this is a complex exercise. We're bringing together engineering data from local government, and obviously, that means they have to be able to provide that. We don't completely control that timeline.
"We've got the data from the insurance companies, which has been really helpful, but we have to get this right. The very, very worst thing I think we could do is go into a community and make some definitive statements about the future and then come back a couple of weeks later and say, 'actually, we didn't get that right'. So we are working as fast as we can.
"We know how stressful and difficult this is. After the Canterbury earthquakes it was at least four months before people started to get these kinds of decisions. I want to be quicker than that. But we've got to get the work right."
