Hawke's Bay Regional Council has substantially reduced the number of unverifiable sites which may be hazardous to the environment.
After being ordered to identify all potentially hazardous sites in the region, in October last year the council released a list of about 1500, of which about 1100 needed verifying.
Regional council chief executive Andrew Newman says since then, staff have visited several hundred sites and there now just over 600 which need to be checked.
The council is still taking soil samples on an old landfill in the Napier suburb of Onekawa, and on land formerly used by timber treatment plants, he says.
