A design for the East Orange Harvesting Wetland was shown to this week's Orange City Council meeting.

The area around Blackmans Swamp Creek between Jilba Street and the Northern Distributor Road would feature raised boardwalks, walking trails, meeting places, viewing platforms, seating, a touch pool and barbecue areas.

However, its primary purpose is to create a holding basin for water coming off Blackmans Swamp Creek to be harvested into Orange's water supply.

And that has residents who live further downstream on Summer Hill Creek toward Ophir fearing they will have less water flowing past their properties.

Council approved the scheme however the work cannot start until further approvals are granted by government agencies after a period of public exhibition.

A staff report said an environmental report had found it was 'not likely' there would be a significant adverse downstream impact from the water harvesting scheme.

Council's director of technical services Ian Greenham said he had offered to meet weekly with some affected landowners to assess the situation.

He said the scheme would be "more environmentally friendly" than the Ploughmans Wetlands.

Mr Greenham said it would take about 12 months to build the project while further approval would take about three months.

In the council's public forum three landowners opposed the scheme.

Orchardist Ian Pearce said he felt like The Castle movie character Darryl Kerrigan but he did not have a top-notch legal expert to fight his case.

He said his business was hit by the drought and needed to continue to access water from Summer Hill Creek.

"Irrigation water is integral to our long-term sustainability and it's actually essential for modern production systems," he said.

"Summer Hill Creek is absolutely essential to us to continue in the future."

Central West Environment Council president Dr Cilla Kinross said taking water would damage the creek system.

"This creek system [is] already over-extracted," she said.

"It's not a magic pudding, you can't just keep taking and taking and taking more and more water out."

Another resident Dennis Marsh said it would affect 60 landowners.

"We appreciate council needs to supply water to Orange but this should not be at the expense of denying downstream neighbours an equitable share of water," he said.

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