By now, the Waiheke Local Board will have decided how it will deal with the Ombudsman’s ruling that local board workshops should be open, transparent and serving their community’s need for participatory democracy and inclusivity.
The agenda for Wednesday’s monthly board meeting included advice from Auckland Council officials on the board’s implementation of Ombudsman Peter Boshier’s ruling in late 2023 on the recent practice of local authorities spending considerable amounts of time sequestered with council officials in workshops behind closed doors.
Against the background of Auckland Council’s successive ‘fiscal holes’ and retrenched front line services, this week alone could see the wholesale privatisation of the management of the city’s remaining 22 pools and leisure centres, putting the quality of facilities and programs at risk.
The council has gone through a business case process and tenders have closed. After a workshop this week, the governing body will decide whether to hand management of all remaining pools and leisure centres to private interests. With no notification or consultation with the public who built, use and pay for them – and will pay again when the leases run out.
Where were the city’s local boards in this almost diabolical heist? Council pools and leisure centres are an essential part of community life; the city’s public pools an affordable necessity across all but the most privileged demographics.
If we had managed to achieve a full sized community pool 12 years ago, it would have been on the block too.
This endemic of petty meanness grinding on staff, assets and citizen welfare, along with the wholesale deferral of the various local boards’ capital works programmes, have now shaved Waiheke’s annual budget to $7.6 million, out of the $30.9 million Waiheke ratepayers pay to this profligate city in rates.
So where is our own local board in all this?
The Ombudsman had ruled that “…local democracy is built on the premise that the closer decision makers are to the population they serve, the more people can, and should, participate directly in decisions that affect their daily lives.
“This is an important task for councils to get right.”.
Meetings needed to be open as the default position, he said in his ruling, repeatedly stressing the importance of inclusivity in local decision-making.
The options officials were to put before the board yesterday asserted (wrongly) that closed workshops are the norm – six of the 13 boards choose to hold open briefing workshops – and fielded a range of options including posting recordings of the board’s (six-hour) workshops and the warning that resourcing council staff to run open workshops would not be feasible for 17 months.
Meanwhile, at Waiheke’s main passenger wharf, another row is brewing over a variation on the council lease for a bike shop inside the Mātiatia terminal. It was controversial in 2022/23 and the new variation would allow the operation of a tour service from the same premises.
Auckland Transport sent the proposal to a Waiheke Local Board workshop earlier this month and the record from the workshop says that the board deemed the proposal reasonable and noted that the decision rests with Auckland Transport. The island’s long-established tour operators, struggling to operate around the Mātiatia monopoly, may beg to differ.
Traditionally and strategically, planning for the wharf has always focussed on moving people away from the wharf as quickly as possible, with the tours and rental cars facilitated elsewhere in the precinct or at Oneroa, ensuring that the busy wharf can be managed as an efficient terminal.
The competitive advantage an operator would gain operating a tour business within the crowded Mātiatia ferry terminal will rile the many small business owners who derive their income from running long-established tours on Waiheke and which, in recent times, have been excluded by AT from touting for business on the wharf and pushed out to the roadside.
The issue of workshops to brief board members of official intentions and even business intentions, anonymously and confidentially, is no small matter or mere notion of democratic principle.
The board has a duty of advocacy for the community and the island’s access to a fair share of our rates is not the only casualty.
We have had too little for too long. Mātiatia is still a traffic midden and plans are still locked in a cupboard. We are still defenceless against unregulated ferries.
The pool project we fought and fundraised for is rigorously sequestered. Te Ara Hura walkway is dropping into the sea and our roads are continuously potholed. A somewhat specious million-dollar plan for a cycleway through Surfdale vanished into the most recent fiscal hole. Even the golf course lease issue has never been addressed and the council building itself is emptied out.
The council has our money. Common sense and collaboration could have found solutions to all these damaging issues – easily.
• Liz Waters
©Waiheke Gulf News Ltd 2024
