Christchurch’s council gets a slap on the wrist over delays relating to a $100,000 report. David Williams reports.
Delays and transparency at Christchurch’s council remain under scrutiny by Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier.
Two years ago, Boshier excoriated the council for its treatment of public information requests, saying reports reflecting negatively on the council had been altered, and incomplete information had been supplied to elected officials. (A case study of the council’s information management was over a $1.245 million touch wall at its new central library, Tūranga.)
The Chief Ombudsman has written to the council again, this time prompted by a Newsroom complaint about a $100,000 report by an external advisory group (EAG). The council initially refused to release the report to Newsroom, and then, early last month, produced a redacted version.
The release, on a Friday before a long weekend, was accompanied by chief executive Dawn Baxendale’s belated analysis of the report, which councillors had requested be finished by the end of November. It was six months late.
Tardiness is just part of the picture. Ratepayers didn’t hear a word about the report until after the draft long-term plan [LTP] had been published, submissions closed, and hearings were being held. Even then, the conduit was the abrasive testimony of former mayor Garry Moore, who chaired the EAG.
Moore asked councillors in May: “Have you considered our report during your deliberations? There’s millions of dollars of savings you could obtain out of this report, and my observation is that there’s been a fair bit of tinkering around the edges, with libraries and art and things like that, instead of looking at the hard things we had in our report.”
Boshier, who took only six days to notify the council of Newsroom’s complaint, wrote to this news website on July 15 to say he was discontinuing his investigation, as the council had released a redacted version of the report. But he assured he would write to the council “regarding the length of time it took for the chief executive to table her response to the EAG report in light of the LTP [long-term plan] consultations and the general availability of information”. (Boshier’s office has not released a copy of the letter.)
He added: “I will be passing your overall concerns onto my systemic and monitoring teams, to feed into any further analysis in this area.”
In an emailed response, Baxendale says not reporting back to councillors “was an oversight on my behalf”.
“In hindsight, I should’ve reported back to the council that a better option would be to share the report’s findings with the mayor and councillors so they could be factored in to their discussions on the LTP.”
The chief executive will respond to Boshier, “reiterating my commitment to the openness and transparency” of the council.
“As a council, it is our priority to provide timely and accurate information in order to assist people to understand how and why decisions are made. I will reassure the Ombudsman that we will continue to conduct our decision making and day-to-day activities in an open and honest manner.”
(Which begs the question, if everything was timely, open and honest in the first place, why did the Ombudsman write?)
Two years ago, Boshier accused the council, under previous chief executive Karleen Edwards, of carrying out “almost an editing of the position to suit senior leadership”. At the time, Baxendale, who was new to the job, said the council fully accepted the report and was committed to changing its culture.
Moore, the former mayor and chair of the five-member external advisory group, says the fact the Ombudsman is still writing to the council with concern “should be something that the elected members should pay attention to”.
“It’s essential in an open society that secrecy is absolutely at the minimum,” he says. “This council seems to have learnt nothing about being open.”
Moore says he shares the Ombudsman’s concerns, especially as he’s aware of what’s in the full EAG report. “If I was sitting at the council table I would be challenging the high level of redaction.”
Newsroom has complained to the Ombudsman about redactions made by the council.
Councillors approved the formation of an external advisory group, to give independent advice on potential savings for its long-term plan, in January last year. The group met behind closed doors 16 times – with meetings attended by Baxendale and various councillors – before delivering its final report last October.
Mayor Lianne Dalziel and councillors requested on October 8 that Baxendale report back with recommendations by the end of November.
That gave the council five months to consider the report before its draft 10-year plan was made public. Yet in March there was no mention of the report. Newsroom’s request for a copy was refused on the grounds of protecting privacy, protecting information provided in confidence, and to maintain the effective conduct of public affairs. (The rejection made no mention of an intention to release the report.)
Submissions on the council’s 10-year plan closed on April 18, five days after the council’s refusal. Hearings were held in May and the plan adopted last month.
When the under-pressure council released the external advisory group’s report in early June it claimed it always intended to. Baxendale reiterated that yesterday, saying: “I always planned that the EAG report, and my response to it, would be discussed by the Council early in June 2021.”
Unfortunately, the chief executive's next sentence is a cut-and-paste from her press statement to Newsroom in May – as is clear from the future tense. “This discussion will take place in the public excluded section of the 3 June Council meeting, with the expectation that the two reports will be released after that, with some redactions to protect people’s privacy.
Another regurgitated line from Baxendale is that the council didn’t release the report during long-term plan discussions because it included recommendations which related to council staff and their employment.
The external advisory group report pointed to the council’s “duplication of activities, lack of automation, fragmentation, excessive manual processing and poor use of technology”.
The high-powered group comprised: Moore; UNICEF NZ boss Michelle Sharp; Louise Edwards, an accountant and professional director; former council manager Mark Christison, Fulton Hogan’s national water manager; and resource management lawyer and professional director Jen Crawford.
In early June, Baxendale said a “significant number” of actions recommended by the group had already been initiated and had been incorporated into the draft 10-year plan. She described the $100,000 spent as good value for money, as the group’s recommendations helped the council save about $18 million, in the first financial year. There’s potential for about $30 million more if other suggestions are adopted.
In its Ombudsman complaint, Newsroom said the external advisory group was given free rein to come to any conclusion and it was the council that decided it wanted the extra layer of advice. “The decision to withhold the advice now is a cynical ploy by this council to keep criticism from the eyes of the public, at a time, I would argue, it needs it most,” your correspondent wrote in April. “Long-term plans are a crucially important part of a council’s planning processes and very much in the public interest, considering the huge sums involved.”
The council’s finalised long-term plan sets out capital investments of $5.8 billion over the next decade, and an average increase for all ratepayers of 4.97 percent this financial year. Gross debt is projected to increase from $1.5 billion to $3.6 billion.
