Chairwoman Anne Tolley on Tauranga City Council commission’s legacies

Tauranga commission chairwoman Anne Tolley reflects on her time leading Tauranga City Council. Photo / Alex Cairns

Just over three years ago, a group of commissioners led by former National Party Cabinet minister Anne Tolley took over running Tauranga City Council after the Government sacked the elected council. As the commission’s extended term now draws to a close with an target="_blank">election looming, the chairwoman tells Kiri Gillespie about her experience – and why her next project involves a 17th-century English cottage.

Anne Tolley says there have been times she’s come home from her role as chairwoman of Tauranga’s commission and cried.

Not that the seasoned politician would let anyone know it.

“That’s my armour. I never let it, let them know that they’ve actually got to me because they may win.”

The former Cabinet minister is speaking about some of the vitriol she’s received since taking on her role as chairwoman of the commission running the city council.

In 2020, then Local Government Minister Nanaia Mahuta sacked Tauranga City Council’s elected members, after “significant governance problems”.

The decision came during a tumultuous start to the council term that saw three of the 11 elected members resign, including first-term mayor Tenby Powell.

In February 2021, Tolley, chairman of growth-focused Western Bay sub-regional organisation Smartgrowth Bill Wasley; adviser to Smartgrowth with strong iwi links Shadrach Rolleston; and former Infrastructure New Zealand chief executive Stephen Selwood were appointed to replace the elected council.

Just over three years later, from her fifth-floor office overlooking the newly revamped Cameron Rd, Tolley, 71, says she feels mixed emotions - anticipation that the commission’s time is almost up, pride at what it achieved and horror at what it originally faced.

Her tenure as a minister has helped her develop a reasonably thick skin, but she says there were still times she would go home feeling “rotten”.

“You know, I never expect the community to always agree, or even understand why we’ve made a decision that we’ve made because they have a completely opposite view, but you don’t need to be nasty about it.”

‘I’m a bit of a sook, really’

Tolley doesn’t do social media but she regularly encounters people in person and receives emails.

She insists that for every bad email, there are at least two of a positive or supportive nature.

“I get some particularly rude ones but look, it’s part of the job, I try not to let it get to me. I’ve learned over the years that you’re still human … you’re still a person.

“I’m really lucky that my husband [Allan] is really, really good and he can tell the minute I walk in the door when I come home – because I go home most weekends – and he’ll know what sort of a week I’ve had.

“He makes me cups of tea and he’ll sit down and let me unwind and sometimes I can talk for an hour, an hour and a half, just letting a whole lot of stuff out that I’ve been really frustrated with.

“I’m a bit of a sook, really,” she says.

Tauranga commissioner chairwoman Anne Tolley looks down on Cameron Rd, which was redeveloped largely under her leadership. Photo / Alex Cairns

The couple celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in November.

Tolley has served more than 30 years of those years in politics, starting in 1986 in Napier as a councillor, then deputy mayor, regional councillor, and National Party MP for Napier.

Her portfolios included education, police, corrections, social development, children, and local government.

These days she is chairwoman of anti-corruption coalition Transparency International’s New Zealand board and a director of Horizon Energy Group in addition to her commission role.

Tolley says she had retired from politics when she decided to make an exception for the council commission role, but despite her political pedigree, her first days as chairwoman were “a shock”.

Tolley says she had previously visited Tauranga but was staggered when she saw the state of the city in 2021.

‘So much worse than I thought’

“I remember, we walked up Devonport Rd and I, I just couldn’t believe my eyes. It was dirty, it was neglected, it was empty.

“I rang my husband that night and I said ‘you have to come and see, I just cannot believe how bad Tauranga is looking’. And as that first week unfolded and we saw more and more of the city and talked to more and more people, everyone was just, everyone was really down, people were grumpy and it, it just was not a good feeling to come into.

“I remember going home at the first weekend and saying to my husband ‘I’m just not sure what we’re going to do’. You know, this was just so much worse than I thought it was because, really, I just thought it was, I guess, a dysfunctional council.”

An independent review had recommended intervention after months of infighting, Code of Conduct complaints and “poor behaviour”.

In March 2022, Mahuta controversially extended the commission’s term to July 2024, delaying elections until then. The move sparked protests calling for restored local democracy.

Tauranga City Council commission chairwoman Anne Tolley at the commission's first public council meeting. Photo / George Novak

Tolley admits she wasn’t prepared for how much the community was hurting.

“You had people who’d lived here for a long time who were grumpy that it wasn’t the city that they knew anymore, all these other people had come in and wrecked their city.

“Mana whenua were grumpy because no one took any notice of them, no one recognised that they were here first and no one recognised the amount of their land that had been taken up by providing for this new growth with traffic and roading.

“And new people moving here were grumpy because they thought they’d come to a big city and it didn’t have all the facilities that they thought would be in a big city.”

‘Outrageous’ what happened to city

One of Tolley’s first actions was to put a stop to the “impossible” 500-page agendas for each council meeting.

“I said ‘I never want to see this again … how can any person read this, digest it?’ My colleagues felt the same, we just thought ‘this is crazy’ and it was simply the habit that the organisation had got into because decisions weren’t being made, more information was always asked for.”

Tolley says the council was focused on process and reporting “and we had to change that”.

“We want stuff delivered,” she says.

“I understand the people that didn’t like losing their elected council. I believe in democracy. But frankly, [in my view] what had been allowed to happen to this city by those democratically elected people was outrageous and not fair on the residents who live here.”

Tauranga City commissioners Shadrach Rolleston (left), Bill Wasley, Stephen Selwood and Anne Tolley. Photos / NZME

She says she believes the city had been “allowed to slip back” while basic maintenance had not been done. The city appeared to her “unloved and uncared for”.

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She says the four commissioners “just gelled as a team”.

“Bill and Shad with the planning knowledge have been extremely helpful and … Stephen with this knowledge of infrastructure. And he’s such a professional, you know. I’d get wound up and he’s always calm and you know, level-headed and thoughtful.”

Walking away ‘proud’

Tolley says several areas were desperately needing attention. She also challenges the arguments against council spending on community facilities such as the Memorial Pools as “nice-to-haves”.

“Actually community amenity is what glues a community, holds a community together, and especially today when you can live anywhere and work, right?

“What is it about Tauranga that attracts the new workers in? It has to accommodate their family, it has to, you know, be a good community and for that you need good amenities and they just, simply, haven’t been invested in.”

Tolley also challenges what she sees as a culture of keeping rates low, comparing an average annual rates bill with that of a household’s average power, Netflix or telecommunications bill.

“We’ve got it all wrong and we shouldn’t be afraid of paying more for our rates as long as we’re getting something for that.”

Last month, the council proposed a 15.8 per cent rates hike to help cover costs such as the Memorial Pools upgrade, transport and housing development at Tauriko and water services.

Navigating the different Governments’ plans and support for key growth work such as State Highway 29 and Tauriko West made addressing the city’s dire housing shortage especially difficult, she says.

Tauranga is a city going through transformation under the leadership of a commission due to end later this year.

It is something the commission is still struggling with, and likely something the incoming council will need to grapple with, Tolley says.

“We banged our head against a brick wall with that for three and a half years,” she says.

“We haven’t resolved it.”

Tolley says she fears the new council won’t keep up with the momentum the commission has set. If that drops, Tauranga will “just fall further and further behind, and that means our house prices go up and up”, she says.

Critics of the commissioners have accused them of using their role and ratepayers’ money to create ego or “legacy projects”, citing the council’s new administration building and civic precinct redevelopment Te Manawataki o Te Papa as examples.

But Tolley doesn’t want to be remembered for a singular project or building, she says.

“For me, it would be that I leave here knowing that over the next five years with the momentum that we’ve got, we’ve faced Tauranga into its growth.

“We’ve filled in some of the gaps but we have a city that’s looking to the future and really confident that it’s New Zealand’s fifth-largest city and it’s a place where things happen.

“For me, that’s much more important than, you know, the individual projects. [To have a city] that it knows who it is, it knows where it’s come from, it recgonises history and it’s got a great future.

That’s my legacy.”

There are also lessons and regrets.

“I feel a bit, ashamed is too big and too strong a word, but I do regret that even though I started in local government and when I became the Minister of Local Government, I really didn’t understand enough about how local government worked. I wish I had known what I know now about local government. It is quite complex.”

Tolley says the funding model for councils is wrong and made it difficult to progress important projects. People’s focus on keeping rates low was another hindrance, she says.

Another regret was “that we didn’t really crack citizens’ assemblies”.

“We wanted to try new ways of communicating with the community that made it easy for the community to get involved.”

Despite the detractors and agitators, Tolley says Tauranga people have generally been “very supportive” of her and the commission.

“It’s been a really good group to be part of and I think, all of us will walk away from the job proud. It has been a phenomenal experience.”

Where to next for Tolley

Tolley says Tauranga is “a fabulous city” and has lived in Pāpāmoa part-time during her tenure. However, she has no plans to move from her Ōhope home.

“If we were in a different part or space in our lives, I would seriously have considered staying on in May, maybe running for a council, but I think my husband deserves to have a bit of time and travel with me, so I’m off to Europe.”

They will fly to England to reunite with their daughter in London.

Tolley will work some of her remaining weeks from Europe and attend the 2024 Transparency International conference in Lithuania.

After the election, she plans to focus on “upgrading” a 17th-century cottage in Sussex the family have bought.

Tauranga commissioner chairwoman Anne Tolley reflects on her time leading Tauranga City Council. Photo / Alex Cairns

Tolley will retain her board roles when she eventually returns to New Zealand.

However, stepping closer to retirement, she will swap council work for pottering around her Ōhope garden and beach walks with poodle Phoebe.

“It has been an amazing job to get the opportunity to rebuild a city.”

But it is time to move on, she says. Not just for herself and her colleagues, but for the city.

Tauranga’s local body election will be held on July 20. Nominations open on April 26.

Kiri Gillespie is an assistant news director and a senior journalist for the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post, specialising in local politics and city issues. She was a finalist for the Voyager Media Awards Regional Journalist of the Year in 2021.