And he says the millions of dollars saved by abandoning the stormwater project could be used to offer subsidies for households to install rainwater tanks and to build a pipeline from Chifley Dam to Bathurst (which would prevent water lost in evaporation).

His proposal, however, has been given a curt reception by council, which provided a one-line response when contacted by the Western Advocate.

Mr Goldney - who was a lecturer for decades at CSU and who received an AM in the Queen's Birthday Honours List in 2018 - has written an open letter to council about its water strategies.

He said Bathurst was saved from running out of water during the last severe drought because, for more than half the time in 2019, the city was harvesting stormwater from the Fish River, "requiring no releases from the Chifley Dam".

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"We used the existing water infrastructure pump upstream of Bathurst to harvest the Fish River stormwater," he said.

Council committed, in 2019, to an urban stormwater harvesting scheme within the city that would incorporate a number of holding ponds and a new pipeline.

The plan is for the water to be piped to the Macquarie River, treated and then used to supplement the town water supply.

Mr Goldney's alternative proposal for council is to model the amount of stormwater that currently enters the Macquarie River via the city's urban streams and then "seek permission from the state government to each year take this volume of water from the Macquarie River via the existing upstream pump, when it is needed in periods of drought".

"This proposal would actually deliver more water than the proposed water harvesting scheme since there is no evaporation from storage ponds to account for, and the city could also capture rain showers up to 10 millimetres that cannot be captured by a built harvesting program," Mr Goldney writes in his open letter to council.

Mr Goldney said his alternative proposal would save council $2 million in the 2021/22 budget as well as millions in state grants.

"Other significant annual savings would be in avoiding maintenance costs and the considerable expenses associated with pumping water," he writes.

The state grants, he said, could be diverted to subsidising residential and business rainwater tanks; building a pipeline from Chifley Dam to Bathurst; purchasing upstream irrigation licences; drilling for water in old paleo streams; and modelling how lowering the water pressure to residential and commercial premises "could offer substantial savings in water use".

Stormwater harvesting made a lot of sense in Orange, he said, "since they are one of the few cities in Australia not adjacent to a major river".

"The proposed water harvesting scheme in Bathurst makes no sense since we already have a pump pulling water out of the Macquarie River. Let's use that pump creatively," Mr Goldney writes.

Mr Goldney is the principal consulting ecologist with Cenwest Environmental Services.

When contacted by the Advocate, council's director of engineering services Darren Sturgiss said "numerous options were considered for water security projects with the current proposal being actioned as the best outcome to secure water yield".