It turns out the Moa Point wastewater treatment plant is only half built. There's another half that was supposed to be built and never was. If it had been built, that spill probably wouldn't have happened because there would have been enough capacity at the treatment plant to cope with the extra rainwater that fell that evening.
Now, we don't know why the second phase was never built. Maybe someone, somewhere along the line in the past 30 years, decided to save some money and shelved it. Or maybe it just got lost on the list of things the council was supposed to do. Maybe, as people left their jobs over the years, someone packed up their desk and forgot to tell the next person, "Oi, can you remember to build the rest of the Moa Point plant?" And so it never got built.
That's a question that perhaps could have been answered by the Chief Infrastructure Officer at Wellington City Council, or maybe the previous Chief Infrastructure Officer, or perhaps their specialist advisers. But none of them made themselves available to be interviewed for this report.
Now, that's suspicious, isn't it? That's the kind of thing you do if you don't want to say something that might be used against you, isn't it?
But here we are once again, with a council dropping the ball on one of its core jobs, in this case treating poo, and then nobody being held accountable. Instead, it's being blamed on systemic issues.
Doesn't that sound exactly like what happened with Tauranga City Council and its failure to act on repeated warnings about the looming landslide that went on to kill people?
Once again, Minister Simon Watts is doing nothing about it. He's simply going to close the book on a sorry chapter and promise that the council is already working on doing better.
Now, I'm getting very tired, and I suspect many of you are too, of councils being really rubbish at their jobs, stuffing up in quite significant ways and then nobody ever getting in trouble for it.
Someone made the decision not to build the second part of the plant, just as someone made the decision not to bother setting up a warning system for a landslide in Tauranga.
I'd like to know who that was, and I'd like them to be made an example of so that other council staffers get a bit of a fright and do their jobs better in the future.
Heather du Plessis-Allan is a journalist and radio broadcaster who hosts Newstalk ZB's weekday Drive-Time Show – where this article was sourced.
4 comments:
Hda, or maybe with the focus being wellington you will understand that they have a very left to far left leaning toward their council, always pretty much have...and probably always pretty much will.
It seems wellingtonians would prefer rainbow crossings, and gender neutral public toilets along with their $300m ratepayers cycle ways, than good reliable infrastructure. Who are we to tell them? Wellington have got what they wanted and deserve.
Unfortunately for wellington, Tory didn't get back in to mayor again, wellington voted for someone slightly less far left, mr little, from labour, so you can probably expect an improvement in their fortunes for a while. It's all about competence folks. (Shhhh, just don't tell wellington people that, they haven't figured it out yet. )
Yes Heather, anyone who is self employed or works in the private sector is all to familiar with the concept of consequences for poor performance and even more so for complete mismanagement.
It is just such a disregard for taxpayer and rate payer values as well as money that this is allowed to continue.
Try getting accountability following Gabrielle and pointing out mistakes made.
All you get is silence and a bigger rates bill.
Yes, we are more than fed up with Councils, led by CEOs on huge salaries, that do not do their jobs. And on top of that are deemed to bear no responsibility for failure to do their jobs.
CEOs are paid large salaries because they were selected to lead Councils based on their academic qualifications and experience in completing large complex programmes of work to a high standard, on time and on budget.
Almost inevitably, they fail miserably on the time and budget criteria but with so many readily available excuses, these failures have become so entrenched that the failures are taken as "par for the course" and no one is even questioned as to why.
The one criteria they can achieve is "high standard". This is not only a requirement for "value for money" but also a requirement for safety puposes. Thus this "high standard" requirement must never be relaxed or not fully implemented.
It is the CEOs job to ensure that this "high standard" is at the forefront of the minds of all Council staff, their consultants and their contractors. If a CEO cannot or does not imbue this sense of purpose into all persons under their responsibility, then the CEO is a complete failure and must be dismissed.
One of the first principles of management is that you cannot have authority without the responsibility and accountability.
For far too long in New Zealand , this principle has been replaced with adage "She'll be right".
Well, in the case of the landslips at Mt Maunganui, and the general absence of three-water maintenance in Wellington leading up to the Moa Point disaster, "She wasn't right, was she".
As usual in these situations the boys and girls get together and agree it was the fault of the system and no one was personally responsible for the deaths of those people at the Mount, or for the shit-storm that hit Wellington.
A small bit of advice to those girls and boys: systems do not make themselves; systems to not operate themselves; people make and operate the systems. And the one in charge of that is the CEO.
But did you hear the audacity of the Tauranga CEO ? "I'm not running away from this mess, I am the best placed person to lead us through it" (all on my $600,000 salary of course, which was paid to me in the first place so as to not let such poor standards prevail.)
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