A WATER security research program will have to find a pay cheque elsewhere after Tamworth Regional Council (TRC) decided it would not throw money at it.
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The council was approached for a second time to support a Water Security Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) that would take a holistic 'whole of catchment' approach to water security challenges and link researchers to industry and the community.
The CRC wanted $10,000 a year for the next 10 years, but councillor Glenn Inglis wasn't having it.
"I'll be voting against it, we voted against it one time previously and the reasons then I don't think have changed much and that is that I don't think it's a local government responsibility," he said.
"It's not site-specific at all and it's basically a PhD program on steroids, while that's fine, for that amount of money I could think of a whole lot of other things in relation to PhD programs I would rather spend that money on that relate specifically to the Tamworth region.
"As you know, water management gets down to state government fundamentally and they're the ones that should be funding this. For me this is not good value at all."
The research centre is made up of Griffith, Curtin, La Trobe, University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland.
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The topics it plans to look into are safe and reliable water systems, optimising investment in blue or green infrastructure, harnessing the value of water and catchment information and enabling sector transformation.
Had the council supported the CRC it would have cost $100,000 in a decade.
It had the support of councillor Phil Betts but most other councillors were against.
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