Gore Mayor Ben Bell and rift with CEO: Inside the relationship breakdown tearing a town apart

Gore Mayor Ben Bell has had a tumultuous relationship with Gore District Council chief executive Stephen Parry since being elected. Photo / Supplied

When young tech entrepreneur Ben Bell became New Zealand’s youngest-ever mayor last year aged 23, his political career seemed full of hope and promise. But just six months into the job, his tenure as Gore Mayor has been marred by controversy, leaks, boycotts, stand-offs and resignations. Bell and his chief executive Stephen Parry have hardly spoken for months and this week an independent review was sought. Herald senior journalist Kurt Bayer takes a look at the bizarre ongoing saga.

Something happened. There had been some dirty politics, some say, leading up to the election. Maybe that was part of it? Or was it the fresh-faced youngster pipping the old guard and taking the mayoral chains in the conservative, southern heartland, upsetting the natural order?

Maybe it was the newly-minted Ben Bell - at just 23 becoming the country’s youngest mayor - saying after the October election that his chief executive officer Steve Parry, someone who he’d have to work very closely with in order to run the district, hadn’t reached out to him to offer assistance. And then Parry producing his cellphone logs showing he did try to call and that his messages weren’t returned.

Whatever prompted the rancorous split, both are tight-lipped as to just why Gore District Council has made national headlines for what appears to be a remarkably dysfunctional period since last October’s local body elections.

Gore District Council Mayor Ben Bell and chief executive Stephen Parry. Photo / Otago Daily Times

The dispute has already drawn blood, with a six-time councillor quitting and anger over leaks from behind closed doors.

On Tuesday, after the council agreed that something drastic needed to change, and they voted unanimously for an independent review to be carried out into governance, while also appointing an intermediary between the two men, Parry spoke out, just a little.

“It’s got quite a long back story,” he said of the rift to media highlighting his post-election olive branch to Bell being ignored, getting things “off to a rocky start”.

They have never recovered. Parry, who has been Gore District Council chief executive since 2001, admits to a “very strained relationship”.

“Trust has… eroded significantly,” he said.

Gore District Council chief executive Stephen Parry. Photo / Otago Daily Times

When speaking to the Herald on Sunday on Wednesday, Bell was somewhat more tight-lipped about what went wrong.

“I can’t really comment on that, unfortunately,” he said.

When asked why, he said it was an employment matter.

“I can’t comment on what happened in that relationship breakdown... perceived relationship breakdown.”

Who is Mayor Ben Bell?

Otaki-born Benjamin Ryan Bell has always been in a hurry.

At 12, the precocious youngster invented a GPS-enabled wristband that helped hospitals trace patients.

As a schoolboy Bell developed a hi-tech hospital wristband. Photo / David Haxton

And by the time he was 18 – commuting down to Paraparaumu College - he was on stage at a major conference organised by Stanford University in California presenting the innovation.

Working at Otaki Countdown saw him save enough money to fund a gap year as a ski instructor in Canada – despite barely knowing how to ski himself.

“It was crazy… I knew the very basics,” Bell would recall.

“I had to learn very quickly as I had two weeks from not really knowing how to ski to teaching both children and adults.”

On his return, he moved to Palmerston North and worked at Horizons Regional Council, examining environmental data.

But all the time, he was working on his own projects on the side.

The self-taught coder had his young fingers in various pies – water monitoring technology, healthcare smart tech, and portable wind turbines.

As his workload grew, and his side hustles bloomed, he decided to go out on his own, launching his own company, Random42.

“We live in an awesome time where you can pretty much learn anything online or from the people around you,” Bell said at the time to media.

Oddly, he found that many of his new clients were hailing from the small Southland town of Gore.

Population of about 13,000, and known for its giant trout statue and being the country music capital of New Zealand, Gore attracted the young up-and-comer.

“The family home is still in Ōtaki but because so many of my clients were down there and for some of the projects there’s a hardware component to it, I thought it would be better to be down there where I could show them how it works.”

Ensconced in the south, Bell got interested in the local community and its issues.

The Southland town of Gore / George Heard

And after many chats with folk he was working with, they decided to get involved.

Along with three others, they formed Team Hokonui, to make a run at council.

“I’ve been around politics my whole life, so I thought I’d give it a try.”

Bell positioned himself as the “change” candidate and campaigned on getting “back to basics’ - fixing rural roads, water infrastructure, and recycling.

Running an innovative campaign in the traditionally-conservative heartland, towing around a caravan and doing a regular podcast, Bell targeted young voters through social media and canvassed the older demographic through the Returned Services Association and other groups.

“We did lots of innovative, different things in our campaign to get community engagement,” he told media.

It worked. Bell pipped 18-year incumbent Tracy Hicks by a staggeringly tight eight votes.

Later, allegations of dirty politics would emerge.

Natasha Chadwick, who was paid $9200 by incumbent mayor Hicks to run his social media as part of his $14,000 campaign, shared private photos of Bell with media outlets after the election, saying “what he [Bell] does socially is absolutely the people’s business”. An Instagram photo showed a male friend kissing Bell on the cheek.

Former Gore Mayor Tracy Hicks. Photo / Supplied, File

Bell told Radio New Zealand he had heard rumours about his sexuality had been circulating toward the end of his campaign, but did not know where they had come from and could not say for sure whether it was a case of “dirty tactics” from Chadwick.

“Things get heated during a campaign, so that’s politics at the end of the day.” Either way, it was “water off a duck’s back” to him.

Gore councillor John Gardyne told RNZ that the election run had been one of the “dirtiest campaigns” he’d known due to the antagonism between the Hicks and Bell camps.

Bell’s fledgling political career wouldn’t be all plain sailing.

A rocky start that never recovered

It was an ominous beginning.

Within weeks, the signs were there that Bell didn’t have the support from everyone inside the Gore District Council headquarters.

On November 23 last year, Bell chaired his first council meeting and immediately came under fire.

In front of a packed public gallery, his request for Gore District Council to employ a personal executive assistant was voted down.

Bell had proposed that he needed his own assistant – working 27.5 hours a week at an annual cost of $70,000 - $80,000 - because he had been “heavily affected” by media since being elected.

He also requested that the council cover $4584 of expenses incurred by Bell and assistant Shanna Crosbie during a two-day training session for new mayors in Wellington hosted by Local Government NZ, which included flights, costs for a flight change, a stay at the James Cook Hotel Grand Chancellor, and hotel car parking.

Parry decided not to reimburse Crosbie’s Wellington expenses after receiving advice on the council’s Sensitive Expenditure Policy while the personal assistant request was also shot down.

Councillor Bret Highsted slammed the request, calling it a “vanity project”, while another said it was a “luxury item” the council could not afford.

Bell agreed to pick up her bill.

But just days later, Gore council was back in the headlines. Seven councillors signed a requisition calling for councillor Stewart MacDonell - a Bell nomination - to be removed as deputy mayor.

It then emerged that Bell was on leave and was not returning reporters’ calls.

The following day, with Bell still out of office, it emerged that three councillors were boycotting a councillors’ team-building retreat in Cromwell, which had been organised by Bell’s executive assistant Crosbie and cost nearly $7000. One councillor, Richard McPhail, left before it began.

By Christmas, the relationship between Gore’s mayor and CEO had totally broken down.

Stephen Parry. Photo / Otago Daily Times

The pair had gone into mediation to try and work out a way forward.

But none of that came to light until March, when journalists were tipped off that an intermediary was being used to work between Bell and Parry.

News that Bell had also walked out of a closed-doors in-committee meeting was also leaked to the media.

The standoff was addressed at a four-hour March 28 extraordinary meeting – called by Bell - where the council unanimously agreed to appoint a councillor to act as an intermediary between the pair on governance and relevant operational matters.

The pair had been having one-on-one meetings since the start of the year but shortly after the meeting, Parry said they wouldn’t continue.

It also led to sixth-term councillor Highsted resigning, triggering a byelection.

In a letter to deputy mayor Keith Hovell earlier this month, Highsted, who is understood to have shared a fraught relationship with Bell, said that since last year’s election, he had found the environment “highly stressful and the levels of anxiety unsustainable”.

Where to from here?

At this week’s council meeting, councillors voted unanimously for an independent review of council governance while also appointing an intermediary and seeking written legal opinion on their recommendation to remove Bell from the chief executive appraisal committee.

Speaking to media afterwards, Bell disagreed with Parry that the council had been “paralysed” for the past six months.

But he wouldn’t elaborate further – although he said another two-and-a-half years in such an environment was not tenable.

“That’s why we have got a review in place and also an intermediary to sort this out,” he said.

“With the resolutions today, we are stepping in the right direction to have that confidence around the governance team.”

Mayor Ben Bell doesn't believe the issues have affected services for the Gore ratepayers. Photo / George Heard

Parry also fronted media, saying that “extreme circumstances sometimes call for extreme measures”.

“And under any independent assessment you’d have to say that council has struggled quite majorly in the last six months,” the CEO said.

Asked why things between him and Bell had dissolved to this point, Parry replied: “It’s got quite a long back story but what I want to emphasise is that I made the gesture the offer of help and assistance right from the get-go.”

He said: “As soon as the mayor was mayor-elect, I reached out to him. I then left a voice message with him to say, could you please give me 10 minutes of your time to just talk through some transitional issues. That voice message wasn’t returned and the subsequent correction I sought from him in the paper wasn’t actioned, and that got things off to a rocky start.

“And then there was a period of just being frozen out. The mayor didn’t want to receive the advice, not just from me, but from my senior staff. That was rebuffed and we got to a situation where we only talked twice, one on one, in two months before Christmas. And I think both sides would suggest that’s not particularly sustainable.”

Asked if he could work with Bell in the future, Parry took a breath before replying: “Look, we’ve got a very strained relationship and I’m on record saying that. Trust has … eroded significantly.”

The Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) has been watching the Gore saga closely.

DIA officials have met with both Bell and Parry over the past fortnight but there are no plans to meet again.

A spokesperson this week told the Herald they are “aware of the situation in Gore”.

“Under local government legislation, councils are accountable to their communities for their actions and decisions, rather than to the Department of Internal Affairs,” the spokesperson said.

“It is not unusual for councils to experience problems in the governance and management of their community.

“There are often more problems at the beginning of each three-year term as new relationships and ways of working are established.

“Councils must be responsible for resolving their own problems. This is the expectation for all councils in New Zealand.”

Local Government Minister Kieran McAnulty is also keeping tabs on things.

“I’m aware of the situation in Gore and being kept up to date and know the Department [of Internal Affairs] is in contact with Gore District Council to better understand the nature of the problem. The department is still at an early stage in this process.”

In the meantime, Bell is standing his ground.

He told the Herald that he’s not going anywhere and wants to keep serving his district for his full three-year tenure, although he accepts it’s been a stressful time.

“For sure... but I have very good support networks around me,” Bell said.

“The community has been incredibly supportive as well to keep my head held high and reminding me that they voted me in. That’s definitely helped me stay positive.”

He also doesn’t think that the relationship breakdown with his chief executive is affecting his community.

“No I don’t think so,” Bell said. “It’s more of a distraction than anything else. I don’t think the ratepayers have been impacted by the breakdown.

“Having media in our council meetings makes it slightly difficult to do our jobs – we can still do them – but it obviously adds a bit of pressure. And while it’s great for Gore to be recognised, we definitely don’t want Gore recognised in this way.”

Gore Mayor Ben Bell’s tenure

• August 2022: Bell throws his hat into the mayoralty race, standing on his own Team Hokonui ticket against six-term incumbent Tracy Hicks.
• October 8: The mayoral race on polling day is too close to call.
• October 17: Bell wins by 8 votes. Hicks applies for a recount.
• October 21: It emerges that Bell’s mother, Rebecca Tayler, had been involved in a recent employment wrangle with the council. Both parties cited legal advice in refusing to speak or say how it was resolved.
• November 2: Bell is confirmed as mayor after Hicks’ recount bid is declined. The new mayor says he hasn’t heard from council chief executive Stephen Parry but Parry later shows phone logs which suggest he had in fact reached out.
• November 23: Bell chairs his first council meeting where his request to hire a personal executive assistant is voted down, with councillor Bret Highsted calling it a “vanity project”.
• November 24: Bell is on leave as seven councillors sign a requisition requesting councillor Stewart MacDonell be removed as deputy mayor.
• November 25: Councillors Highsted, Neville Phillips and Bronwyn Reid boycott a councillor’s retreat in Cromwell. The retreat was organised by Bell’s executive assistant, Shanna Crosbie, and cost nearly $7000.
• November 29: Bell returns to work. Parry says Bell’s proposed governance structure of six committees and five portfolios would cost the council $300,000 a year to run.
• December 1: Council meets behind closed doors to discuss its governance structure. At the meeting, McDonell tenders his resignation as deputy mayor.
• March 28, 2023: Council holds an extraordinary meeting to discuss issues between Bell and Parry. The council unanimously agrees to appoint a councillor to act as an intermediary between the pair on governance and relevant operational matters.
• March 30: Parry reveals his working relationship with the mayor is “very strained” and they no longer talk.
• April 3: Councillor Highsted resigns, citing a “highly stressful” council environment since the election, where he found “levels of anxiety unsustainable”.
• April 18: Council unanimously vote for an independent review into council governance to try to restore confidence. Councillors also moved to formally remove Bell from the committee that oversees Parry’s performance – and to appoint an intermediary for the two men.