By Justin Tuburan

Thames-Coromandel District Council says they’ve “been in touch” with Brando Yelavich after an online war of words erupted between the two last week.

This emerges after Yelavich revealed to the Waikato Times two weeks ago that TCDC had stopped waiving his rubbish dumping fees and claimed they had been ignoring his request for a meeting, spawning a week of back-and-forth between the two on social and mainstream media.

Yelavich is the founder of Project Guardian, a viral volunteer conservation effort to clean up legacy rubbish in the Coromandel bush, operating for the last two months as documented on social media.

In an interview with CFM Afternoons, Yelavich told Rob Holding last week the council stopped waiving his fees out of nowhere.

“Now that I've been receiving some donations from the public so that I can do this almost full time, the council have told me it’s a health and safety risk”.

He also said he had formally requested a meeting with TCDC to discuss a formal partnership, a request which had not been replied to since it was sent on September 30.

A TCDC spokesperson told CFM they were preparing a reply when Yelavich began publicising the disagreement on social media.

“He had a few questions about what was involved, and we were in the process of pulling some information together for him, but the next day he made a social media post that said council had called him a liability”.

“That’s not what we said, we actually explained WE have liability if anything goes wrong, which is why we couldn’t do things the way he wanted us to”.

In response to Yelavich’s social media posts and appearances in the media, TCDC posted on Facebook a so-called ‘Mythbusting’ post.

The post doesn’t name Yelavich but makes reference to claims circulating on social media about council.

In the post TCDC says “you hate rates, we hate asking you for rates, and everything costs too much. We wish we had lots of money to spend on anything that sounds like a good idea, but we don’t”.

The post also hits out at accusations of ‘red tape’ halting support for Yelavich.

“We don’t have as many followers as some people because we have to do run-of-the-mill things like ‘follow the law’ and ‘make sure people don’t die on our watch’. We actually think that’s quite important.”

TCDC told CFM that the characterisation of council on social media wasn’t based on the full facts.

“We never said ‘no more waivers ever’, but we did tell him we couldn’t keep waiving his fees on an ad hoc basis”.

They said the short notice the influencer gave council to waive his fees on the four occasions he did since September was “not the way to do it”.

The spokesperson confirmed TCDC has reached out to the influencer and discussions were taking place looking at what a formal partnership could look like.

Yelavich also confirmed this to the Waikato Times over the weekend.

TCDC says “we think Brando is doing some really good stuff, but we do need to be mindful that other people are also doing good work that isn’t so visible to the public”.