Wellington City Council faces a problem passing its own Long-Term Plan because of controversy over its stake in Wellington Airport. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Wellington City Council faces a problem passing its own Long-Term Plan because of controversy over its stake in Wellington Airport. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Heather du Plessis-Allan
Heather du Plessis-Allan is the drive host for Newstalk ZB and a columnist for the Herald on Sunday
The big test is shaping up tobe whether the council can pass its own Long-Term Plan next week. This should be basic stuff. It’s the very business of the council. If they can’t pass the plan, they literally can’t do their job.
Doubts are emerging whether it will pass.
The problem is the sale of the council’s stake in Wellington Airport. It has become so controversial that councillors on both the left and the right are planning to stop it, by voting down the Long-Term Plan.
But that’s not even half the story. Such is the worry that will happen, Greater Wellington Regional Council (GWRC) is now exploring buying the shares from WCC to help it out.
That’s crazy. GWRC doesn’t have $278 million to spend on bailing out a buddy. They need the money to pay for any number of transport problems and busted water pipes. Good luck to GWRC trying to sell that to ratepayers at the same time as hitting them with a 20% rates increase.
But it gets even better. Unelected staff on WCC have been exposed as heavying elected councillors to force the sale. Some councillors say they’ve been threatened in legal advice (paid for by unelected staff) that if they don’t back the sale of the airport shares they themselves would be at risk of prosecution.
The rot goes to the top. Even the CEO Barbara McKerrow put the squeeze on, issuing a new rule that bans elected councillors from being able to access all the information they need to do their jobs.
When he heard that, Local Government Minister Simeon Brown said he was “appalled” and that “[t]he CEO is acting like a politician when she should be acting like the CEO, and the politicians should have access to the information that they need.”
McKerrow withdrew the rule.
Wellington City Council chief executive Barbara McKerrow. Photo / Mark Mitchell
WCC is clearly dysfunctional. And that’s without even including the mayor’s alcoholism and absenteeism, unelected officials’ bizarre attempt to give free money to a Nasdaq-listed Reading to renovate the cinema complex, and the never-ending examples of council decisions squeezing the life out of inner-city retail.
Very few watching this circus will need to be convinced that grown-ups should be called in, at the very least a Crown Observer.
But the Minister shows no enthusiasm to pull that trigger.
And from his perspective only, he’s right to be reticent. He should let WCC do an undeniable job of wetting itself in public first. The catastrophe should be beyond doubt and he should appear forced to intervene.
Partly, that’s because his party, National, has made a big play of letting local communities call their own shots. As dysfunctional as this council is, it is what the local community voted for.
But also, stepping in too early has the potentional to backfire on him. The optics of a National minister neutering the power of the country’s first Green mayor and most left-wing council ever could be used against him. At worst, he could be accused of taking revenge against mayor Tory Whānau for the stream of stupid things she said about him before the last election.
But more than anything, a Green-led council fighting in public is hardly a spectacle a centre-right central government should rush to hide. WCC became the darling of left-wing voters when it was the only council that moved left in an election where most councils shifted to the right.
But the disaster they’ve turned into has even members of the Green Party distancing themselves from the Green mayor.
As they say, never interrupt your opponent while he is in the middle of making a mistake.
It’s just a pity Wellington ratepayers have to suffer that mistake.
