Whangārei District Council's representation review - including Māori seats - goes out for consultation

Whangārei residents will be able to have their say on a new-look councillor lineup. Photo / Michael Cunningham

Whangārei residents will soon be able to have their say on a new-look councillor line-up including two new Māori ward councillors.

Whangārei District Council's (WDC) proposal will seek public feedback next month as part of the process of bringing in a new Māori ward.

The ward would have two representative councillors for the next local government elections.

Their introduction has forced a representation review, which includes public input.

WDC is proposing a mayor and 13 councillors - 11 from five general wards and two from a district-wide Māori ward - for the next elections in October 2022.

The council's final political representation proposal is expected to have formal councillor sign-off this week.

WDC councillors met last Tuesday in a livestreamed online deliberations meeting to consider how 61 public submissions on its initial proposal would help shape that final proposal.

Whangārei mayor Sheryl Mai was forced into a decision on whether to use her casting vote to break a deadlocked 7:7 split-council voting.

This voting centred around a last-minute call from a councillor to radically change the final proposal.

Cr Carol Peters pushed for district-wide voting to replace WDC's general ward structure.

Mai supported this during debate. Crs Gavin Benney, Nick Connop, Tricia Cutforth, Jayne Golightly and Anna Murphy were also in favour.

But Mai then chose not to use her casting vote, and in doing so supported the initial proposal's ward-based status quo.

She said this choice was because WDC's initial representation review proposal, including general wards, had already gone out to the community for feedback.

Mai said she was in favour of Peters' proposal but she had chosen not to exercise her right to make a casting vote because there was clearly a split among councillors.

Deputy mayor Greg Innes, Vince Cocurullo, Ken Couper, Shelley Deeming, Phil Halse, Greg Martin and Simon Reid voted for ward voting structure retention.

Shaping the final proposal to go to the public next month is based in part on initial proposal submissions, more than 40 per cent of which were anonymous.

Cr Anna Murphy questioned this aspect, which also angered other councillors.

"To me it beggars belief that people can write a submission without a name on it and it can be taken seriously," Cr Couper said.

Cr Nick Connop said it raised the question of whether WDC councillors had put in submissions.

Mai said trust was required around this.

"It is a scenario of trust and I would hope nobody has breached that trust," she said to councillors.

Meanwhile, north Kamo was the focus of intense debate around which ward it would be in under the final proposal.

It was eventually put in the new Whangārei urban ward, rather than the neighbouring more rural Hikurangi Coastal ward which some councillors argued for.

The proposed new Whangārei urban ward combines the city's current Denby and Okara wards.

Whangārei's growing urban footprint was also shown with the addition of other areas on the city's south-western fringe being added to the ward, following public feedback sought on an initial representation review proposal.

Adding more people into the ward will be among the reasons New Zealand's Local Government Commission (LGC), rather than the council itself, will likely have to make the final decision on how Whangārei's political representation will look for 2022.

Additional people in the Whangārei urban ward will mean a greater than 10 per cent difference between the number of constituents that councillors across the board represent, forcing the LGC decision-making requirement.