Mayor Glover: Trying to make an omelette without breaking eggs?

Analysis. 

There’s no doubt that John Glover is the right man to start the long process of repairing community trust in the Queenstown Lakes District Council - but that process needs to be visible and start soon.

Mayor Glover gets extra points for treading carefully in his first few months. Local government is a minefield of potential employment land mines and populated by civil servants with decades of practice at how the system works - in fact they wrote many of the rules themselves.

They also have decades of practice at spinning their situation to evoke sympathy and support from ratepayers in order to protect their monopoly position.

We’ve published below a little wish list that might help Mayor Glover roll up his sleeves and start pruning and tweaking what’s become, in our view, an overgrown monster.

If he doesn’t then Central Government will soon do it for him - and in the process take away many aspects of local democracy that we’ve tended, dangerously, to take for granted.

Use it - or we will lose it.

Before we get into that list - the prompt for this piece comes courtesy of the previously reasonable and fair Councillor Gavin Bartlett. Gavin’s been sharing recently, in print and at last week’s full council meeting, that it’s unreasonable to criticise senior council staff “because they can’t defend themselves.” He also thinks it was OK for the previous mayor and his CEO remuneration committee to launch a secret CEO recruitment process without consulting anybody else.

• Councillor Gavin Bartlett. “They can’t defend themselves.” Really??

Well Gavin, we’ve had eight years of being mercilessly attacked by senior council staff (at the ratepayers expense). Ratepayer money being used to fund defamation cases that never saw the light of day, Media Council complaints (with one key staff member boasting in an LGOIMA released email “we’ve got the Media Council on speed dial”), LGOIMA requests refused and redacted - you name it - we’ve seen it all. These people can more than defend themselves - they fight hard to protect their positions and will do almost anything to keep secret things that they want kept out of the public eye.

By the way, this “we can’t defend themselves” nonsense is also being used by Wellington City Council civil servants, 300 of whom have just lost their jobs … joining the 15,000 or so Government workers now looking for a new career.

It’s tough out there at the moment - for almost everyone - with the possible exception of some QLDC staff (there are 600 of them) and their favoured external consultants. Many are very, very good at their QLDC jobs and deserve far better representation from their council bosses.

OK - so they are all good human beings - we all are, generally. But trimming budgets and fixing broken systems are things we all do in our households, in our small businesses, in our medium businesses and even our large businesses. The big companies overseas make people redundant 10,000 or 15,000 - even 30,000 at a time.

So Mayor Glover - here’s a gentle prompt as to where the trimming might start:

• The $46 million on four new indoor courts at the Queenstown Event Centre and $26 million on the Ladies Mile sports field. Scrap the $46 million (and any idea of a third swimming pool for Queenstown) and either build a new council HQ at 516 Lades Mile or sell the land for cash - up front (not 20 years delayed payments).

• Scrap the “Alliance” in terms of buildings roads (to nowhere) and projects like the $250 million (part NZTA funded) BP “white elephant” intersection that’s not even designed to improve traffic flow.

• Freeze new residential developments until you have a handle on why our sewage plants are broken - any doubts, then check out the total collapse of Veolia’s Wellington sewage plant this week. The events are connected.

• Stop gambling, speculating and inventing “clever” schemes - it’s not the council’s area of expertise and having lost an arguable $400 million in the last ten years on crazy schemes like Lakeview it’s time to face the music, investigate exactly what went wrong and never do things like this again.

• Question the wisdom of ratepayers money funding the teaching of older people how to drive or use computers, staging Teddy Bear’s picnics, employing “Freedom Camping Ambassadors”, sponsoring perfectly profitable large events like Warbirds Over Wānaka, giving the Mountain Scene $200,000 a year for promotional QLDC content (and some council notices that nobody reads) , employing a team of economic development people who don’t seem to understand either “economic” or “development”, trying to socially engineer whether we use bikes or cars to get to work, employing external consultants (often former council staff) to do everything and therefore avoid any direct council accountability, employing a comms team who think their job is to “protect the staff and market the council” and at the top of our list realise that your 4% community trust rating (including the “uninvited” responses that ended up in the bin) is real and therefore stop using consultants to improve your “customer service” when the real problem is that the community has lost faith in virtually all members of the current Executive Leadership Team.

Make no mistake, even this initial list, is a very tough call for Mayor John Glover. But with the community and a new, fresher bunch of elected councillors on board - it’s possible and necessary.

And please Councillor Bartlett - enough already with the “they can’t defend themselves” rhetoric. They’ve been defending themselves too much and for too long.

It’s time the QLDC joined the same Real World occupied by us, the ratepayers - the people that fund their salaries. The monster has become self-aware - we are on your side Mayor Glover in whatever you and your elected team decide is necessary. That’s why so many of us voted for you.