Mayor Wayne Brown has spent $299,053 in outside legal fees at one of New Zealand’s top firms for advice on a raft of legislative issues including the damning review into the Auckland Anniversary Floods and the council’s divisive annual budget.
The legal fees paid to Meredith Connell span from October 8, 2022, when Brown was elected, to April 5 and average $50,000 a month.
A source from a former Auckland mayor’s office administration said when asked if they were typically spending $50,000 on average per month on outside legal fees: “Hell no.”
The fees paid to Meredith Connell come directly out of the mayor’s office’s own annual budget of $5.2 million. If averaged out across a financial year, Brown would be spending more than 11 per cent of his mayor’s office budget on legal advice if his fees from Meredith Connell continue at this rate.
The legal fees were released to the Herald under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act. The response specified the fees “includes invoices not paid yet but have now been accrued to reflect true costs”.
The bill also comes from the same firm from which Brown’s chief of staff, Max Hardy, was a partner at until he took a role in the mayor’s office in December 2022.
A statement from the mayor’s office outlined the broad subjects for which the advice from Meredith Connell had been sought.
“Mayor Brown has a significant agenda of change which requires support. The Auckland Mayoral Office engaged Meredith Connell to provide independent legal advice to assist with the mayor’s agenda,” the mayor’s office said in May.
“This included advice on the mayor’s powers in establishing an office, the creation of new governing body committees, Letters of Expectations and powers in relation to Council-Controlled Organisations, transport planning, temporary traffic management, the annual budget process, and matters arising from the Auckland Anniversary Floods and the Bush review.
Meredith Connell also provided personnel in the Mayoral Office during the transition including the acting Chief of Staff. There are no current engagements with Meredith Connell.”
Hardy told the Herald that while the legal advice was paid out of the $5.2m mayoral office budget, the contracts with Meredith Connell was signed off by Auckland Council’s director of governance, Phil Wilson, who sits outside the mayor’s office.
“The mayor was elected to do things differently, which requires independent advice,” Hardy said.
On June 9, Auckland Council’s governing body made up of the 20 elected ward councillors and the mayor approved the annual budget and reduced the council’s airport shareholding from 18.1 per cent to 11.1 per cent. The contentious budget took two days of negotiations in Auckland Town Hall in order to be approved after a compromise was reached over the mayor’s original proposal to sell the council’s full 18.1 per cent ownership.
Hardy clarified the mayor’s legal advice over the annual budget was sought in the initial stages of the proposal process - in December 2022 and January 2023 - and was not from more recent deliberations in the last few months.
The statement from the mayor’s office also reveals Brown did seek legal advice around the independent review he commissioned into the January 27 floods in which four people died.
Undertaken by former police commissioner Mike Bush, the flood report found a “failure” of leadership on the night, from the mayor to emergency service and Auckland Council executives, who “underestimated the importance of their visible leadership roles”.
Draft sections of the 107-page review were supplied to both Brown and outgoing Auckland Council chief executive Jim Stabback.
The Herald had previously reported that Stabback and the council engaged legal advice on sections of the report prior to it being publicly released on April 12.
However, Hardy told the Herald that Mayor Brown’s legal advice was taken in the initial stages of the Bush review around “how to engage” with the process. The mayor’s office did not seek legal advice after receiving draft sections of the report, Hardy said.
A source from a previous mayor’s office said there were times during a term when substantial outside legal fees were required, but it was not a consistent expense month to month.
“In terms of your own spending, it was at specific times when you wanted to know something about transport, or something like that,” the source said of how legal advice for the Auckland mayor’s office was sought.
“Those types of inquiries with lawyers would be primarily [to] do with the mayor’s role, [his] authority to act and specific advice relating to policy leads or budgetary leads.
“And that would have been pretty rare because the mayor’s office budget is primarily spent on your staff and the cost of your staff … [that’s] by far the major chunk.”
Another legal source familiar with the workings of the council attested to the expense of legal advice and how a $300,000 bill could accumulate.
“The thing is, if it was stuff that you really needed, if you really wanted to be on a sure legal footing, because you know, they had consultants in at the port and stuff … it wouldn’t be hard on any kind of major stuff to run up 60 grand [a month],” the source said.
“I presume it must be to do with some sort of reforming sort of thing. And I think the ports is the most obvious one.”
While the legal source made clear they had no context for what the mayor’s $300,000 of fees was for, they said: “I can imagine a number of scenarios where that would arrive as the bill.”
They also said Hardy himself would not necessarily be able to provide his own thorough legal advice on policy considerations of the mayor’s, as the chief of staff role was more than demanding enough to preoccupy someone.
“Max, I assume he’s not a lawyer for the council or the mayor’s office. He’s a political staffer. What I mean is, he could sound out the mayor on that sort of stuff, but if you were getting full-on legal advice, you’d still want to get it from a firm rather than from your chief of staff.
Auckland councillor Chris Darby hoped the legal bill had come about only after the mayor’s office had fully exhausted the internal Auckland Council legal team’s expertise.
That internal legal team was established when the Auckland Super City amalgamated into Auckland Council in 2010 and saved tens of millions of dollars over the duration since, according to Darby.
“I would expect that the mayor is only taking external legal advice where that advice is not available within council,” Darby said.
“You know, in the planning space, if you’ve got some challenge, you might call upon your own people who say, well, I probably need to get a second opinion on this and I can get that from Simpson Grierson or I can get it from Meredith Connell or whatever.”
It was also noted by a council source that caution should be taken around the choice of outside legal firms to consider any perceived conflict of interest.
“Is there not a perceived and possibly actual conflict of interest going to Meredith [Connell] when you’re chief of staff?,” the source said in reference to chief of staff Hardy’s past employment at Meredith Connell.
“Our code of conduct … it’s not just about actual conflict of interest, it’s about the perception as well. So as a public entity … for us, it’s what is the perception for Auckland is here?”
Hardy also said if you took the entire spending of Brown’s budget in the first six months of the term, it was less than the spending of former mayor Phil Goff’s office in the same time. Goff came under fire from some Auckland councillors after commissioning a report for a national stadium in central Auckland after he was elected in October 2016 which ended up costing $932,000.
In January, the Herald reported the mayor’s office had spent $123,000 in legal fees at Meredith Connell on top of its fees to Hardy during December when he was only Brown’s acting chief of staff.
Tom Dillane is an Auckland-based journalist covering local government and crime as well as sports investigations. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is Deputy Head of News.
OPINION: New Zealander reflects on delivering speech at St James' Palace.