Rudman's city: Words don't mean same in council's Wonderland

By BRIAN RUDMAN

You have to start wondering if someone is slipping hallucinogenic substances into the water up at the Auckland Town Hall. How else to explain such oddball behaviour as advertising 138 council houses for sale when they weren't?

Embarrassed finance director David Rankin called it a "process error".

For the council's tenants it was rather more scary than that. They've been living on borrowed time ever since the Auckland Citizens and Ratepayers Now majority and their soulmate Mayor John Banks took office last October.

They hardly needed such a false alarm to remind them that doomsday was nigh.

So I thought it was, anyway. But after receiving a letter recently, I'm starting to think that under the new Citrat regime, a whole new anti-world is emerging, where words have come to mean the opposite of what you and I thought they did and we will all live happily ever after, after all.

Until a few days ago, I was convinced the Citrats were about to lop at least $25 million off Auckland City's budget. After all, back-to-basics had been a keystone of the mayor's and the victorious team's election programme.

Immediately after the election the mayor and Citrat leaders set out to make good their promises by calling in former National Party finance minister Sir William Birch to review council expenditure. His official brief was to come up with "options for targeting a $25 million decrease in expenditure". Sir William came up with even bigger cuts and every one on the right was exceeding happy.

Jump now to a column I wrote at the end of January in which I mentioned, in passing, that frock designer Marilyn Sainty was, and I quote myself, "so disgusted with the expenditure cuts on things like pensioner housing, tree protection and the art gallery ... that she immediately went out and hired a billboard ... to express her concerns".

It was an innocuous summary, I thought. How wrong I was.

From the town hall came a furious denial that there were any cuts planned. I was, in my "socialist inspired writings", perpetuating a myth, claimed my correspondent, former policeman-turned-National MP and now mayoral executive officer, Peter Hilt.

Interestingly, the letter, while purporting to be from Mr Hilt, was actually signed and presumably written by Peter Verschaffelt, a bureaucrat employed by the city as communications manager.

Not a job description, one would have thought, which included as part of the brief political mud-slinging at troublesome journalists at the ratepayers' expense.

Whatever, the Hilt-Verschaffelt letter brought home to me what an Alice in Wonderland world city hall has become.

"There are no expenditure cuts whatsoever involved in the council's decisions on pensioner housing," begins one paragraph. Immediately following comes: "The Chief Executive is to report on a strategy to exit from its ownership of pensioner housing."

Compare that with the press release last December 14 from the same Mr Verschaffelt about what the Birch report says on pensioner housing.

Just one quote from the report is highlighted:

"A gradual sale of pensioner housing will generate significant savings for Auckland City through reduced operating and capital expenditure and reduction in debt servicing when the proceeds from sales are used to repay debt." Sound like expenditure cuts to you?

On December 19, a special meeting of councillors endorsed the Birch report's recommendation and voted to "gradually exit" from pensioner housing. The councillors also voted to raise pensioner rentals to reduce the costs to ratepayers.

The second Hilt-Verschaffelt myth was my linking cost-cutting and tree protection. "In respect of tree protection," it said, "there are no expenditure cuts." Surprised? Well me too.

The Birch report said that the requirement to seek a resource consent to trim or remove mature trees cost the council $450,000 a year. It said more than 95 per cent of applications were approved. "There seems little point in imposing this unnecessary cost on ratepayers." The special meeting of councillors agreed.

The motion began: "That because of the disproportionately high cost of current controls ... the council promote a plan change to remove the general tree protection provisions ... " Sound like cost-cutting to you?

Finally, Ms Sainty had mentioned the art gallery. The Hilt-Verschaffelt letter slid around this, talking of no expenditure cuts for "arts, culture and recreation" or for the libraries.

Let's stick to the art gallery. The Birch report failed to single out the art gallery, recommending instead, a broadbrush $2.6 million of expenditure cut from "arts, culture and recreation" over three years.

The councillors were more specific, voting for reports on "possible ways to reduce the net cost" to ratepayers of not only the art gallery, but the zoo and the Edge as well.

Once again, it smells of cost-cutting to me.

But, in a world where a public body can advertise for sale 138 tenanted homes that are not for sale, and claim $25 million worth of belt-tightening is not cost-cutting, I guess words have begun to lose any meaning.