Nickie Muir: Legal eagles fly high in North

Nickie Muir

It's mysterious and astonishing the extent to which the Whangarei District Council staff seem to rely on lawyers for basic management decisions.

Given that collectively the senior management team cost ratepayers more than $3000 a day for their advice, you'd think the need for constant costly legal advice would be minimal.

Following the Brian May case, the recent hearing over the sacking of the chief executive officer's PA, we have also had to pay for the full-time council lawyer and at least five other lawyers for months and, as taxpayers, the machinery of the Employment Relations Authority itself. I doubt any of them charge minimum wage.

It seems a silly and expensive way to query an employee's political neutrality instead of a what should have been a 10-minute conversation about boundaries. Consider the CEO's time to prepare and consult with other highly paid staff, the lost opportunity in having attention distracted from core business and the true cost could be close to $500,000. That's a lot of footpaths.

Stan Semenoff said he would rather have given the 80K spent supporting Jan Walters on a local charity and I'm sure many would agree, however necessary it may have been to address a dismissal that was patently unjust. Expensive and wasteful as it is in a region where every cent counts yet where council staff do not count the value of their own time, the money is not the most disturbing aspect of this case.

Mr Simpson's actions in dismissing a staff member for signing a mayoral nomination form - which she had freely admitted to doing, while sanctioning a full-time PR man to work on another candidate's campaign - does more than risk the perception of bias.

In my opinion, it calls into question the integrity of the decision-making process throughout council, bringing it into serious disrepute. That the then acting mayor, Phil Halse, praised the CEO's performance at the time and, after consideration of the council code of conduct and disciplinary policy with two other councillors, found the CEO "could not be criticised" is either a failure to understand the codes and is incompetent, or an indication that a CEO who has been there for almost two decades does become "untouchable".

More disturbing still, is that Mr Halse's, Jeroen Jongejan's and John Williamson's sanctioning of the CEO's behaviour gave the perception city hall had closed ranks and that this was a matter not for normal process, but for expensive legal force. Without the chutzpah and financial clout of ex-mayor Mr Semenoff, it is likely Ms Walters would have had to accept her dismissal and just "move on".

Staff and citizens learn lessons from such examples. Does a litigious culture come from the top? Or should we give up on council management and councillors and get a legal firm to do the job? There's certainly no shortage of lawyers.