Simon Wilson: Watercare boss had to go but there's still much to fix

Watercare chief executive Raveen Jaduram, who has resigned. Photo / Greg Bowker

COMMENT
Poor Raveen Jaduram. He really did little else than his masters' bidding, and now he is no more.

I know, crocodile tears. With a salary of $775,000 he's the highest-paid executive at Auckland Council (excluding the port) and he's been in charge of the most egregiously mismanaged utilities crisis we've seen in the city for decades – and that's saying something. It's surely only right that someone bares their neck for it all.

Auckland's water crisis was entirely predictable. Not predictable to Watercare itself, apparently, although that's hard to fathom. But it was predicted by Niwa and the Met Service. They've told us, for years now, that the climate crisis will keep getting worse and that in the upper North Island the most acute risk is from drought.

"Average rainfall is projected to decrease for those areas," said Niwa, "particularly during spring and summer, which… is likely to result in more frequent and severe droughts."

Did Watercare think this was just greenie talk? Something for other people to worry about, later on, one day in the never never?

That was the first problem. Failure to plan for likely events. There were so many more.

Auckland had a wet spring last year and the dams were full. Then it had the driest January on record, with just 11 per cent of the usual rainfall, and it stayed dry. But Watercare did not announce water restrictions until May.

Where were they during those five long dry months? Still on their summer holidays?

Then Watercare told us its application to draw an extra 200 million litres a day (MLD) from the Waikato River was smothered in Resource Management Act red tape: 96th in the queue, languishing since 2013, and it couldn't be fast-tracked.

Which was true, but beside the point. Watercare has always known the consent would not be heard for years, and yet it had no other significant plan.

In fact, the only way Watercare was going to get an extra 200 MLD from the Waikato was if there was a crisis so bad it forced the Minister for the Environment to intervene. Which is now happening.

Was that the plan? Sit tight and wait for the Government to bail us out?

And what then? Watercare's strategic approach to resilience has not included building capacity ahead of demand. So even if the minister overrode the RMA and granted Auckland an urgent new water right tomorrow, Watercare would not be able to use it. Building the filter capacity will not be possible until well after the severe drought we're expecting this summer has come and gone.

Watercare has always had other options. More maintenance over the years would have reduced losses through leaks. The pressure could be turned down a little. We could have more flexibility around the use of non-potable water. The ridiculous regulatory barriers to residents collecting their own water could have been scrapped much earlier.

Waitakere Dam at 42 per cent capacity, April 2020. Photo / Sylvie Whinray

Meanwhile, that Waikato pipe dream aside, there's been very little future planning. Where will the water for Auckland's fast-growing population come from? A desalination plant? New dams? Snow trucked from the Southern Alps?

It might as well be the snow, because none of the more credible options is even planned, let along ready to build. Watercare does not seem to have a plan.

Jaduram earned the big bucks for presiding over all this and now, it seems, has lost his job for mismanaging the response to the crisis. His replacement, we can be sure, will have a lesser salary. Mayor Phil Goff has consistently downgraded the salary level of all top council appointments.

But Jaduram didn't invent the council set-up and has not been solely responsible for the predicament we are now in.

He has a board, which sets the financial and strategic parameters for his work. They are culpable too. And the board is answerable to council itself.

Watercare used to be much admired in local and national government circles. That's because Aucklanders pay less for water than most other ratepayers. One reason: we have a separate bill, so we know how much we're spending. But another reason we pay less is Watercare's failure to spend for the future.

Why did this happen? Because it was meant to. When the super city was set up in 2010, all the major utility and service operations were kept out of the hands of politicians, by having them run by "council controlled organisations".

But council control was nominal and CCO executives earned bloated salaries for keeping costs down.

They did it by neglecting infrastructure. And they were smiled on by their boards and by a succession of politicians in Auckland and Wellington who regarded cost-cutting as a primary function of government. In water, as in transport, very little was built.

Outgoing Watercare chief executive Raveen Jaduram: responsible, but not on his own. Photo / Greg Bowker

Now we have a water crisis and Jaduram has to go: with the job, not to mention the dosh, comes responsibility.

Frankly, though, his board might consider their positions too. And let us hope, whoever forms the next Government, that the city is able to reform its governing structures. We need far better planning, and accountability, for the difficult decades to come.