It's near the end of her fifth week in the job, and if new Napier City Council chief executive Dr Stephanie Rotarangi has any views on her council's past performances, or performers, she isn't giving anything away.
That is, other than to say that among the challenges is that facing most city and district councils across the country, the consequences of not keeping up with investment in a range of infrastructure that in Napier dates back at least to when the council was established, as a borough council in 1874.
There seems to have been a gathering of pace, in the wake of such things as the Christchurch and Kaikoura earthquakes and the Havelock North water crisis, the whole country could have done without Covid-19, and Napier could have done without the one-in-250-years flood that devastated the city four months ago.
So, if it's disaster and calamity you think we've got, then Stephanie Rotarangi, from South Otago and coming back to Napier after five years in Australia, is the woman for the job.
As Victorian Country Fire Authority deputy chief officer and having already managed the response to the 2019-20 summer bushfires that claimed 34 lives in Victoria, she has just had four months seconded to manage the state's response to the pandemic, as Victoria headed rapidly towards what is now a total of at least 820 deaths – more than 10 times as many as in the rest of Australia.
Hand-picked for the role, she found communication among the authorities and agencies to be poor.
"It was out of control," says 46-year-old Dr Rotarangi.
It helps that when she and husband Anthony spent three years in Hawke's Bay from 2000 to 2003, in forestry roles with Pan Pac and Carter Holt respectively, their response was not a lot different from that of a lot of other young people venturing into Hawke's Bay – thinking as they left to pursue the paths of their careers that returning to Hawke's Bay in the future, to settle down with the family, was not too bad an idea.
"We absolutely loved it," she says, so while it wasn't being actively pursued it was always on the cards, and it was a combination of circumstances that brought the family back to Napier.
A friend had drawn the job to her attention, she'd been thinking about a future career in local government, and about the time the city was dealing with the impact of about 250mm of rain, the heaviest in the city in almost 60 years, the daily pandemic daily death rate in Victoria had just come down to zero, and Rotarangi was thinking of sunny Hawke's Bay.
The appointment was announced by Mayor Kirsten Wise in late December, with a Covid-19-dependent start date of February 9.
She hasn't been disappointed. She was able to start on time, her husband had landed a job, children Kieran, 15, Nina, 14, and Tai, 11, had been settled into three schools, 7-year-old transtasman-flying soft-coated wheaten terrier Bonnie had settled into her new environment, and the view from the new CEO's level 2 office in temporary city council home Cape View House on the corner of Marine Pde and Vautier St is one to die for.
There's also something about being able to just pop down the stairs, cross the road and meet your local media among the features of the beachfront.
The story of Stephanie and Anthony, who is a descendant of Tūwharetoa and Tūhoe, is one for the glossy mags, in that they were born a few months apart in Rotorua, and teamed up years later during uni days in Dunedin.
She grew up with a sister and three brothers and their parents on a farm, ultimately moving to Otago, where St Bathans became home and where she worked for some time as a rousie in the woolsheds, before starting on a career path in forestry and firefighting operations.
Her PhD at the University of Otago was on human resilience, with a thesis, as noted by the university in notes on "alumni and friends", researching resilience and culture, and a biological principle of how plants thrive. She studied people and their attachment to land and how that changed over generations, including an "in-depth look" at the changing land ownership patterns of Māori.
The Victorian CFA was asking what made people resilient in a crisis, and what helped people rebound from emergencies, and her studies as a PhD candidate and researcher were tested more as the stories of tragedy and people's lives unfolded in the bushfires and the start of the recovery afterwards.
In Napier, succeeding predecessor Wayne Jack, another New Zealander who had come back after working in Australia, to where he returned in March last year, she's aware of the challenges, especially with the council services scattered over several sites since the Civic Building was vacated in haste amid a failed earthquake risk assessment in 2017.
But she says the proximity with the grassroots appeals, and with more than 500 staff she's confident about the rule – delivering on the strategy and goals set by the council.
Besides, for a Black Caps tragic Melbourne and the not-too-distant MCG felt a bit out of place, and with McLean Park just down the road she's in the right place with the cricketers in town later this month to play Bangladesh.
Life, however, is not all a lush green oval, and Dr Rotarangi says, recalling her last few months in Melbourne, how she knew how to live like those being affected by the pandemic. Like others, she had to work from home, and exercise was being allowed to take Bonnie for a walk.
"It was really starting to affect the social fabric," she says.
In Napier she couldn't have got into it quicker, within an hour of hitting the desk she was at the first of three days of revenue and finance committee hearings, the hearings guided Napier's new rating structure, with submissions from members of the public.
Now follows the finalisation of the three-yearly long-term plan, also about to go out for public consultation.
"It's been a month very much about meeting people," says the Napier council's first female town clerk, city manager or chief executive officer. "I'm a recent arrival. I'd like to listen."
