Reflecting on the year Tauranga lost democracy.

Wow, did I pick the year to get into local politics!

I just started writing all of this down to make sense of it to myself, and now it’s the next morning, the papers are out, I’ve not made a statement. It’s impossible to comment on this in one soundbite.

I think there’s a lot of lessons in the story below so I’ll share it as my last correspondence as a Tauranga City Councillor, in the mother of all years.

In October 2019 I got a phone call from the Chief Executive of TCC to say I’d been elected.

I was pretty excited! Although after calling the people who I knew I wanted to work with from the campaign, I realised many of them had missed out. There were however a couple of shining lights, so I was sort of hopeful.

I waited for the get togethers - where we would all meet each other, find out who we all were, our aspirations, what we were bringing to the table, what our skill sets were and how we would work together as a team and how we would operate as Governance.

Weeks went past and nothing, it was so odd.  We got a thorough organisation induction - went on bus trips around the city to understand the scale of TCC’s operations: Waters, roads, new developments, projects that had gone well, projects that hadn’t and the growth challenges facing our city.

We got sworn in and the council meetings started, the 400-page agendas started, and the discontent between the mayor and some elected members that had brewed during the campaign continued. The community wanted engagement, cycleways, carparks, a better city centre, less traffic, more housing, less concrete. The weight of the last 20 years’ decisions rests with you when you get elected onto Council.

The new Government had now been in for two years and all of their new policies started landing on our staff. Policies that have far reaching implications for our city, especially one growing as fast as ours. These policies came with no resourcing but required a massive amount of staff time in an already stretched organisation.

A New Year. An attempt at a team building retreat failed.

Then COVID started to march in. We did much of our annual plan by skype or a combination of both. Staff worked tirelessly to adapt – implementing new work systems, closing facilities, managing public spaces, emergency services, homeless people and stranded travellers.

We had to completely redraft the annual plan based on less income, less ability for ratepayers to handle much needed rates rises, and still the same number of city-wide issues and a looming recession.

We were all proud of that annual plan, every elected member worked hard through incredibly challenging circumstances. We read over 3000 pages of submissions and got as much in there as we could for the communities we represent - overall it was well balanced and comprehensive. I felt like I was just starting to understand the beast and was looking forward to the next two years.

In May a coup happened (House of Cards Tauranga). Some embittered elected members decided to demote the deputy Mayor and succeeded; divisions deepened.

An information request was received from council. It was the biggest request in council’s history and apparently around the country was very unusual in it’s scope. Someone wanted huge swathes of information from all our cell phones and all of our emails. Petty, derogatory, crass texts and emails were thrown all over the media that showed the mayor and councillor divisions. It was such a huge blow to those of us that had not been engaged in any of it, and even more to those that were. No underhand deals or fraudulence was discovered, but those comments kept resurfacing everywhere and divisions became irreversible.

Then around September the bloody car parking building failed. It absolutely wasn’t council’s fault this time, but it was simply gutting seeing that waste of ratepayer money - and completely demoralising for everyone, especially when the city centre just needed good news stories. The community, who were already doing it tough, were now over us.

The Long Term Plan started being prepared right on the back of the Annual Plan. Staff never got a break, COVID compacted everything. They were tired, we were tired.  Individual councillors were trying to fight battles for their communities based on individual ideologies, because we had not had the bandwidth or the leadership to develop a collective strategy to pull us together.

By this time everybody had retreated so far into their corners that functioning effectively as a team became impossible. Although we were still making well-considered decisions in the chambers as items reached our agenda, they were not as a result of our own strategic direction. They were from the organisation, who were barely tolerating us now, and blazing ahead at the now normal breakneck speed.

The Councillor I was most aligned with resigned. I guess having an extra 20 years on him I’d developed a thicker skin. One shouldn’t have to. We need young people who still believe change is possible.

It was at this time that we voted to bring in the observer and support team.  I was relieved, finally we were getting three highly experienced professionals to help bring us back to a working relationship.

I had one meeting with that team; it was just over 30 minutes long, right at the very start. I said a few things but was confident that there would be a lot more meetings so hadn’t even begun to explain what was going on from my perspective. I suspect everyone else was the same.

The team observed us for six weeks, and we were not allowed to interact with them individually as they feared it would appear as political favouritism. After six weeks of watching us, they wrote up a damning review.

It was all accurate in the report. We were at our very lowest, so were the staff.

The mayor resigned, and I can understand that, it was the best decision for him. It has however been very interesting watching the leadership style of the acting mayor since then; we have gone from having a completely fractured group, to having everyone in the room. Speaking frankly, listening to each other, and working together to try to work out what to do. There are still however a few very loose cannons (who I am sure are not finished firing yet) but nothing we felt we couldn’t handle.

So I am really a bit gutted today on the one hand, and a bit relieved on the other. Although I completely agree that the council team was not functioning, I absolutely question that we had reached the threshold for commissioners. With a city manager to work with us and step in if they had to, we could have maintained democracy and built a better framework for the next election.

We had an opportunity for two new elected members in the bi election to help change the dynamic. I was really hoping that the acting mayor would have an opportunity to lead, she would have been excellent, and I hope she runs again when we come out of all of this.

We didn’t need a nuclear bomb, we needed professional support - and the Government and Local Government New Zealand watched as we fell apart and were lobbied hard by people who had half the story and their own agendas for wanting commissioners. Not once did government representatives contact any of us to hear our views prior to the Minister's letter informing us of commissioners (which we received by email an hour before the media).

I hope that at the very least this sad situation is a catalyst for a complete overhaul of local Government. This system is close to breaking point.

Yes many councils function very well around the country, but we can’t leave that to chance. There are a number of councils not coping. We need better resourcing and better election systems to ensure we have better Governance outcomes.

At the end of this reflection I will reiterate some of the changes that I have given in a previous speech that I think could help to bring about better local democracy, but first off there are a number of things that I am very proud of being part of achieving this year along with a (sometimes slim) but sometimes majority vote of councillors.

1. The pending establishment of an independent sustainability advisory board made up of nationally recognised experts in environment, urban planning, culture, climate change and economy, underpinned by a resourced Tauranga based challenge team. This was set up in order for us to develop a sustainability framework for our city and provide ongoing independent peer review and direction for elected members and the organisation, to help get the very best guidance for transitioning to a more sustainable future for our city. I sincerely hope the commissioners and the organisation really make the most of this opportunity.
2. Totara Street cycleway. A safe separated cycleway underway down the length of one of our most challenging and dangerous roads. It’s a start, I can’t say I’ve managed to get the city-wide cycleways any higher on the agenda, and these are still sorely lagging behind most cities in the country, even with some of the best conditions for cycling in the country.
3. The preservation of Our Place and the support for the Remaker Space. A grass roots oasis of local vibe, music and solutions for waste, by the community for the community. These types of projects are key to keeping the CBD thriving through the rebuild, and it is a rebuild, our CBD is going to be a thriving hub once a again once we get people living down town.
4. The initiation, funding and completion of the first 6 months of Kāinga Tupu, a strategic, collaborative taskforce in the Western Bay to address homelessness.
5. Signing off on a Council led Kerbside Collection service, which will have composting, better recycling, exciting opportunities for future circular economy businesses and a significant and annually growing effect on our waste to landfill. Although some controversial elements and change is not easy, overall it is a big game changer for environmental stewardship in our city.
6. Gifting of a culturally significant piece of land to the Otamataha Trust.
7. Recommending a Māori Ward to increase our tangata whenua representation within Tauranga City Council,
8. Giving voting rights to our mana whenua representatives on Standing Committees;
9. Passing, by unanimous vote, a Right of First Refusal to mana whenua, to purchase Council owned land that is no longer required for strategic purposes. 

I would have liked the opportunity to be involved in the strategy for the Long Term Plan. We have just started a very rushed version of one, but I do not believe we are at all ready to present it to our community. We need another year to work with our partners and our community – I imagine everyone does around the whole country. The world has changed, it COVID has given us an opportunity to reset and we need that to sink in and understand the new baseline for future planning. (Hence the need for a four-year term).

In my view there are two fundamental issues which are out of our power to change alone. Perhaps this is something that commissioners can help our city work towards during the next two years.

1.  Explore the potential for a Western Bay Unitary Council. The multitude of overlapping governance, plans, teams, strategies and funding is just not working. The Port has a major impact on Tauranga industrial land supply and yet Tauranga City gets barely any funding from it. Western Bay is unable to deliver the transport it wants to because it is surrounded by Tauranga and is reliant on its central hub, but not aligned with it. Regional Council runs the buses, TCC run the infrastructure, and on it goes.
2.  We need to stop allowing developers to “masterplan” our cities. This rush to open more greenfield land to solve our housing crisis is solving a problem for today and creating significant new ones for the future. Government needs to actively step in to ensure any new developments are designed to create outcomes for better, more connected communities. Councils have very limited powers to do this, plan changes are not enough, they are only resulting in the same type of housing on ever smaller sections. We will not be able to retrofit the miles and miles of predominantly single story sprawling suburbs rolling out to the East by opening more land for even more.

And finally, in parting, to the recommendations I’ve given before when this mess first reached the public arena.

System change to enable better governance.

1. A four-year term and four yearly LTP review. Three years puts enormous continuous pressure on staff and resources in an ever increasingly complex system. Give space for the organisation and governance to breathe and deliver some work, observe outcomes and create strategy to respond accordingly.
2. Better resourcing for elected member teams, governance support and local governance and team facilitation prior to inauguration.
3. A two term (8 year) maximum for elected members unless applying as mayor. Allow fresh thinking to flow in as this should not be a career choice. The gains from keeping experience in the room is far outweighed by the increasingly desperate political antics to keep the jobs people get very attached to.
4. A person should only be able to apply for one role, mayor or councillor, not both. The campaign investment for mayors is of course higher than elected members, they receive more media and public attention and as a result end up getting in. In my experience this year with four mayors-in-waiting, was a recipe for dysfunction.
5. Resigning should not trigger a by-election, the place should be offered to the next in line from the last election. It should be possible for someone to resign if they feel they need to, with dignity and grace. By-elections are expensive, distracting , divisive and create voter fatigue.
6. Make Maori representation on our councils mandatory. This is not a threat to democracy, It’s about observing that representation is not currently there, and is needed so we can not only honour The Treaty, but build better communities.

I believe if we’d had these 8 actions in place we would have more women, more young people, more trust from our community, less stress and anxiety, a team focussed on the best outcomes for our city, and we wouldn’t have commissioners coming in in place of democracy.

It’s a pretty sad day in my view - but at least I don’t have 1200 pages of holiday reading! And it may well be that it works out really well, and that this is a reset and shakeup that this city needs to move forward. Time will tell. I certainly hope so.

It’s up to everyone to make sure that the commissioners hear loud and clear what kind of city we want for our future.

No regrets.

Have a great Christmas Tauranga.

Everyone deserves a wonderful break.