Neil Taylor, back as Napier City Council Acting CEO in March 2020. PHOTO/SUPPLIED
The Napier City Council is telling its stand-in CEO he should be at home. He's telling them he won't let them down.
That's the nature of the job for Neil Taylor who returned to the Council as Acting CEO about three weeks ago, becoming probably the most experienced council boss still in the job in New Zealand – a combined total of about 22 years.
He is "over 70", the age at which the experts were saying even before the Covid-19 lockdown was the age from which everyone should be staying home, because of a higher risk to the more senior of the nation's, and the globe's, citizens.
Instead, expecting to be in the job maybe four weeks while a new CEO was sought to replace the recently-resigned Wayne Jack, plus perhaps whatever time it might take for a new appointee to be on-site, the term in the role has become quite indefinite.
"I haven't told Wendy yet," he says, suggesting an evening glass or two of wine with his wife might help make up news he's unlikely to home a lot as the crisis continues, along with planning for how Napier, the city, Hawke's Bay, the region, and the nation emerges from 24/7 uncertainty and returns to normal afterwards.
On Wednesday, the Council, as it was bound to do with the announcement of a nationwide State of Emergency, voted him, or anyone else who may enter the role of Napier City Council; CEO, extended authority to help make the city run over the coming weeks.
While all council meetings have been cancelled, the Council also voted in steps that mean if meetings have to be held they can with just two physically present, when the previous requirement for a quorum had been seven. Other councillors will, of course, take part via the various internet options.
It seems ironic, then, that despite the physical separation of the country's population, stay-at-home edicts, two-metre rules and all, he's never seen it, or most specifically Hawke's Bay, more united.
His office, with its own management team, is a layer beneath the Hawke's Bay civil defence team based in Hastings, with people, he notes, from as far as Wairoa and Central
Hawke's Bay, many of whom will be not be seeing a lot of their families for several weeks.
Beyond that are the national civil defence emergency and Covid-19 response teams at Government levels in Wellington.
Chief executives meet daily via the medium available, and each evening Mayors, chief executives and other senior officials are convened similarly, under the chairmanship Hawke's Bay Regional Council deputy chair Rick Barker, who as MP for Hastings-centred Tukituki was once Minister of Civil Defence.
"One thing I do have to say," says Taylor, recalling such as Cyclone Bola and the more recent Havelock North water crisis, "is that the level of regional co-operation now is something I haven't seen before."
"Honestly, it's very much a team effort, we're following the national requirements, and definitely working hard on keeping the whole of Hawke's Bay on the same page."
It includes planning the post-Covid response, the "next steps", getting people back to work.
Taylor had been CEO in Napier for 20 years until his retirement in 2013.
It was part of a changing of the guard, with the retirement of four-term mayor Barbara Arnott and the pair's replacement by new mayor Bill Dalton and new CEO Jack, who had come back to Napier from Australia.
But less than three years later he was at work with the Hastings District Council, in a special projects senior advisory role, finding himself "in the wrong place the wrong time" when the Havelock North water crisis erupted in August 2017.
It was the biggest health crisis in living memory in New Zealand until the February 28 revelation that Covid-19 had breached the borders, with at that time the first disclosure of a person testing positive.
Between the crises, Taylor was in April 2018 appointed Acting CEO in Hastings following the departure of Ross McLeod, and served in the role for 16 months.