Bob Edlin: Reserve land gift, a $200,000 rift.....

....and when the Mayor was miffed, a councillor was given short shrift

Good questions were raised at a Rotorua Lakes Council meeting this week about the proposed surrender of more than $200,000 in annual lease revenue.

But some questions are best not asked – at least, not when Mayor Tania Tapsell is chairing a meeting.

One councillor smartly learned what happens when such a question is asked: the mayor will be riled and the inquisitor exiled.

We were alerted to this by a Local Democracy Reporting account of the meeting which said:

Rotorua councillor Robert Lee was ejected from a council meeting today after a heated exchange with Mayor Tania Tapsell over the future administration of reserve land occupied by the Rotorua Thermal Holiday Park.

Lee was ordered to leave this morning’s meeting after questioning a proposal for the Rotorua Lakes Council to relinquish its role as administering body for the Crown-owned land.

Lee argued the council was giving up more than $200,000 in annual lease revenue, while supporters said the proposal concerned the administration of Crown land, not a council asset.

It seems the councillors were considering a Department of Conservation request for the council to relinquish its role as administering body for the reserve.

Here’s what PoO understands is happening:

The Rotorua Thermal Holiday Park is on a Crown-owned reserve land, historically gifted by Māori people under the 1880 Fenton Agreement for recreational purposes.

The land’s management structure involves –

• The Land Owner (The Crown)

The land itself belongs to the Government (The Crown). Because it was originally gifted by Ngāti Whakaue, there has long been a cultural and historical push to have the underlying title of the reserve land formally returned to the tribe.

• The Administration (Transitioning)

The Rotorua Lakes Council for decades has acted as the official administering body for this Crown reserve, collecting over $200,000 in annual lease revenue from the park’s commercial operators. But the Department of Conservation has asked the council to relinquish this role so that the Crown can change how the reserve is managed. This has sparked intense local political debate.

• The Business Operator

While the Crown owns the land, the holiday park business itself is operated by a private commercial lessee who maintains the cabins, motel units, and communal facilities under a long-term lease agreement.

The Local Democracy Reporting report of the meeting from which Cr Lee was given the heave-ho says Pukeroa Oruawhata Trust, a Ngāti Whakaue tribal entity, would take over the administration.

The land would retain its reserve status and public access arrangements.

The council first backed the idea in 2017.

The council last month approved a similar transfer for Tarawera Landing Reserve (also known as Waitōharuru).

The Thermal Holiday Park proposal at that time was deferred pending further discussion.

Lee obviously does not think a transfer would be a smart thing to do.

“We are proposing to surrender nearly a quarter of a million dollars in revenue,” Lee told the meeting.

He questioned whether ratepayers would ultimately have to make up the shortfall from lease revenue generated by the holiday park.

But apparently, he was failing to grasp what was being decided – it was about what should happen now, not what might happen as a consequence.

That’s how PoO understands the issue after reading:

Chief executive Andrew Moraes said the decision before councillors was not about who would ultimately administer the reserve, but whether the council should relinquish that responsibility.

He said future funding decisions would be considered through the council’s long-term planning process.

Is that all he said? Or did the reporter leave something out?

Without some sort of elaboration, we can understand why Lee remained unconvinced.

“The ratepayers will have to take up the slack,” he said.

Lee said councillors were likely to be grappling with double-digit rates increases through the long-term plan process.

“So don’t come running to me and say, ‘How are we going to get the rates down?’ … because we keep on giving away our revenue to our mates,” Lee said.

Tapsell immediately challenged the comment and asked Lee to withdraw it and apologise.

We are left to assume Lee dutifully obliged, because he was able to pursue his line of inquiry.

Trouble is, the mayor bridled at what he said next.

Lee then questioned whether any elected members were beneficiaries of the Pukeroa Oruawhata Trust.

Tapsell responded by ordering Lee to leave the meeting, saying he had failed to act “within the order and also the respect that is expected of an elected member”.

Obviously it’s no fun, sitting around a council table talking about a holiday park and the lease income it generates, because…

Lee said he would be “delighted to leave” as it was “chairmanship gone wrong”.

The bizarre consequence is that when he had gone, the mayor addressed his question:

After he departed, Tapsell said there were “no conflicts of interest” and “certainly no financial conflicts”.

Lee obviously had been niggling at the conflict-of- interest potential from the kickoff:

It was not the first clash between the pair. Lee had been threatened with ejection just minutes into the meeting, after questioning whether elected members connected to Ngāti Whakaue should declare a conflict of interest, a suggestion Tapsell rejected.

It is not clear whether Lee had left the meeting when the question of what happens to the lease income was discussed.

Supporters of the proposal argued the council was giving up an administrative role, not a council-owned asset.

Under the Reserves Act 1977, revenue generated from reserve leases must generally be applied to reserve purposes rather than treated as unrestricted income.

Councillor Ben Sandford said any lease income generated from reserve land was required to be reinvested into reserve purposes.

“So, it’s not a net loss to the community,” he said.

“It’s actually just a more specific investment into the reserves that are going to be administered.”

Hmm. It seems there’s no financial benefit in administering whatever must be administered in the park arrangement.

The motion was carried after Lee’s removal.

The mayor later invited him back into the meeting.

We don’t know if he was delighted to return.

We do know it was then too late for him to ask a question that nags us at PoO:

If there’s no money in it, why would anyone want to take over the administration of the Rotorua Thermal Holiday Park.

Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE.