Georgina Campbell is a Wellington-based reporter who has a particular interest in local government, transport, and seismic issues. She joined the Herald in 2019 after working as a broadcast journalist.
Mayoral hopefuls can make all the promises they want about building cycleways, fixing broken pipes, and cutting wasteful spending, but it all means nothing without a working majority around the table.
Having the numbers is something they can't possibly promise.
Nobody knows for sure who exactly will be electedon to each council around the country until local body election results come through on October 8.
Mayors who win by a reasonable margin should be able to rely on that as a mandate for their policies.
Sir Peter Jackson gave Foster $30,000 for his campaign, which gave him profile purely because a famous filmmaker was backing him.
The election result said more about Lester than it did about Foster and hardly made for a convincing mandate.
Nor did Foster find overwhelming support from his councillor colleagues, many of whom were still very upset Lester had lost.
He had been a lone wolf councillor for the best part of 30 years before he was elected as the mayor. His time was mostly spent down in the weeds of the detail he loves to be across.
Foster showed no ability to emerge from those weeds to build relationships and find a working majority within the left leaning council.
The result was chaos.
There were calls to bring in commissioners, a facilitator tried to sort everyone out via Zoom, emails with last minute changes were sent flying in the early hours of the morning, and eventually an independent review of council governance was ordered.
But guess what? Mayors cannot be removed from office by the council.
All councillors can do is undertake a vote of no confidence in the mayor, which really doesn't change anything. In this case Wellington City councillors have not resorted to this.
Councillor Jenny Condie did lodge a formal code of conduct complaint against Foster, who ended up being told to apologise. That's it.
Wellington mayor Andy Foster. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Mayors are elected by the public. So even if they turn out to be hopeless, everyone has to wait another three years until the next election to exercise the full force of accountability.
Regional councils don't have this problem.
Each councillor is elected to represent an area in the region. They then vote among themselves on who will be the chairman or chairwoman of the council.
This works well because the chair has the confidence of the council from the outset. The chair is accountable to their colleagues, who can just as easily boot the chair out again.
It's this sort of political coup that led to the resignation of Greater Wellington Regional Council chairwoman Fran Wilde in 2014.
It could be argued this is a far more sensible way for a mayor to be elected, but regardless of Wellington's trials and tribulations, I disagree.
I like that a mayor is elected by the people and for that reason is directly accountable to them. The mayor is the people's person, a leader that's very visible to them, someone who represents them.
The problem of a working majority is exactly why you won't see Rongotai MP Paul Eagle running on a Labour ticket if he decides to take Foster on for the top job (it is widely rumoured he will).
He won't want to have to tie himself to Labour's policy platforms or its candidates for that matter.
That's no offence to them, it's just he would need to keep Labour at arm's length if he wanted to build support across the political spectrum for a working majority.
Former Greens chief of staff Tory Whanau, the only person to formally declare she's vying for the mayoralty in Wellington, has already made a point of pitching her experience negotiating with Labour and New Zealand First.
She's right to. The ability to negotiate and find consensus among a range of views is arguably the most important skillset people should be looking for in future mayors.
Essentially, can they build and navigate dynamic relationships?
Making promises is one thing, but we need local government politicians who can deliver on those promises through consensus building and leadership.
