A battle has been raging at Carterton District Council resulting in cancelled meetings, accusations of a coup, and with no long-term plan sign-off in sight.
Mayor Ron Mark said auditors had identified dozens of issues with the council’s long-term plan, making it unfit to be signed off.
Despite this, he said a group of councillors and the chief executive had made attempts to convene council meetings against his advice so they could get the long-term plan "signed off and approved hastily".
"I was told the problems [identified by auditors] were easily resolved and we should have the meeting and be done with it, despite the fact we would not have received a qualified or unqualified opinion.
"I believed that would be dangerous."
The mayor said an "attempted coup" had transpired where councillors Robyn Cherry-Campbell and Dale Williams "involved the CEO and coerced other councillors to meet and sign off the plan against my directive that we not do so".
"Trying to take control of the council is unusual. I could even describe it as reckless," Mark said.
"In this coup, they managed to convince a number of first-term councillors, who can be forgiven for not understanding the seriousness of the issues raised by Audit New Zealand, that they should support the meeting going ahead."
Mark said "things became clear from the audit office" that they would not issue a draft audit opinion on the long-term plan, “and that ended the matter”.
"I am grateful that Audit New Zealand with the oversight of the Auditor-General has made the decisions they made because it has brought this to an end and crystallised the matter to be dealt with."
As part of the long-term plan process and final audit review, an audit opinion is required to allow councils to adopt their plans.
In a joint statement, Cherry-Campbell and Williams said their actions were to ensure meetings could be held as soon as possible to "understand and fully appraise this challenging situation" as it developed.
"The issue to us is that, to date, council have not been made fully aware of the detail of Audit New Zealand’s concerns," they said.
“A majority of councillors expressed to us the urgency to meet as a full council, to be updated on the issues from the mayor, chief executive, and staff in relation to the long-term plan, audit process, options for progressing the long-term plan (that we’ve been working on for the last 18 months) and risks for consideration.
“We wanted assurance that council operations would continue despite delays.
“We felt it was important that we met as a council to understand the issues that were causing these delays.
“The goal of us all is to ensure Carterton District Council achieves a clean audit opinion to enable the long-term plan to be progressed and finally adopted by full council at the appropriate time.”
A statement from the council said it was continuing to review its long-term plan after the Office of the Auditor-General “raised matters that require further changes”.
“The delay to obtain a council resolution to adopt the plan means rates cannot be set for 2024/2025 and council’s Fees and Charges for services remain at 2023/2024 levels.
“However, council will receive a recommendation to adopt the Fees and Charges for 2024/2025 at the next council meeting on Wednesday, July 31.”
Carterton District Council chief executive Geoff Hamilton said that without an audit opinion, the council could not provide the community with “sufficient comfort that the numbers contained within the long-term plan are accurate”.
“Given this, the only possible course of action is we go back and find the issue, quantify it, and fix it in the long-term plan,” he said.
“We also need Audit to review the refreshed long-term plan and issue an audit opinion before we bring the whole long-term plan back to council for consideration.
“In short, we cannot continue on with the long-term plan in its current state.
“We will bring a paper to the July 31 council meeting with an update and decisions we wish council to consider. We will continue to work to resolve the issues with Audit NZ.
“For now, I’d like to focus on getting through this significant bump in the road and complete an long-term plan that is robust, accurate, audited and available to elected representatives with sufficient time for council to consider adopting it.”
The council has until the end of September this year to determine rates.
“At this stage our focus is ensuring continuity of service to our community and clarity over ratepayers’ billing,” Hamilton said.
Local Democracy Reporting is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air
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