Rudman's city: Contracts at the crossroads for city's top bureaucrats

Over the next few days Auckland City chief executive Bryan Taylor will probably be gazing enviously across the city to regional council headquarters and wondering where he went wrong.

He and his regional council counterpart, Jo Brosnahan, are coming to the end of their five-year employment contracts and are seeking renewals.

For Ms Brosnahan, the process has been a breeze. ARC chairman Phil Warren made it clear where his loyalties lay by burying his organisation's one token advertisement in the jobs columns of this newspaper on, of all days, Boxing Day.

If that wasn't enough to dissuade any hopefuls, the wording would have been:

"The current incumbent has satisfied all the requirements of her current employment contract and performance agreement and is expected to apply for a further term. This advertisement is inserted only to comply with the requirements of the Local Government Act 1974."

Unsurprisingly, just one person applied for the $212,715 job: Ms Brosnahan.

On Monday night, regional councillors agreed to proceed to the formal interview stage. But with just one candidate, it's hard to contemplate any change come September, when Ms Brosnahan's contract expires.

Over at the town hall, councillors took to their obligation under the law to advertise the job with much greater verve.

Not only did they decide to canvass the nation for alternative candidates, they advertised Mr Taylor's $283,287 job in Australia and Britain, too.

To help them, they retained job-hunters Cambridge Consulting Services. A budget of $12,000 was approved for advertising, with another $39,000 for the consultant's "base" fee. Other costs, such as travel to Britain for interviews, are still to come in.

The advertisement acknowledged that "the incumbent is expected to apply," but there was none of the overt support of the ARC advert. It listed among the expected attributes of the candidates, "courage and political astuteness."

A queue for the job soon developed. One councillor says more than 30 applied. Other reports are more modest.

Whatever, there is now a shortlist of five, including Mr Taylor, an Australian and three New Zealanders. Only the incumbent has local government experience, although another has connections with a local government agency.

For a council with its fair share of stroppy, independent women, I was surprised to learn that interviewing the wife or partner (all the shortlisted are men) was a part of the winnowing process.

The "little women" feature again next Monday when the five candidates and wives mingle with councillors at an informal afternoon tea at the council building. One councillor likens it to reality TV, but I'm told there will be no scone-making or evening dress contests.

On Tuesday it's down to business when candidates are interrogated by panels of councillors. Later that evening the full council meets in secret to make its choice.

In private enterprise, to see your job advertised like this would not only be humiliating, it would mean you were on the way out. The same goes for the public service.

But thanks to a 1989 amendment to the Local Government Act, a council CEO can be appointed for up to five years. Then the job must be readvertised.

Somehow everyone lost sight of this change until late in 1999, when a local authority sought the advice of the Attorney-General. He checked with Solicitor-General John McGrath, who was in no doubt of what the law said.

The alarm bells began ringing around the town halls. It was estimated that more than 50 local government chief executives had had their contracts rolled over without any advertising.

Those contracts were illegal. Worse, decisions made by councils led by "illegal" CEOs were open to legal challenge.

To legitimise the situation, last March the new Government quietly pushed through restrospective legislation validating the appointments of the past decade. Since then, local government CEOs' jobs have been advertised every five years.

But as Phil Warren has shown, there is more than one way to do that - the expensive way and the other.