Not a fan of Porirua council

Your headline ‘‘We were wrong’’ (July 16) is the untold story of local government.

How often do communities have to suffer the consequences of incompetent decision-making, inaccurate record-keeping and subsequent false reporting?

In recent months we have learned of a failure to maintain community assets (PLT), inadequate engineering (leaking pool), plain stupid decisionmaking (connecting a 400mm pipe into a 250mm pipe) followed by false claims that it wasn’t council’s fault.

Now we hear that, in fact, it was council’s fault and it did approve the connection.

Just last week Wellington’s mayor chastised John Morrison for intending to coerce the then chief executive into doing what he (and presumably other councillors) wanted with regard to CCOs.

She seems to think that it is not the role of the governance group to instruct the chief executive with regard to their wishes.

We appear to have the same sort of muddy thinking taking place in Porirua.

It is time our elected representatives understood that their role is to decide on the desired aspects of our city’s future, following competent advice from the chief executive, and hold him accountable for ‘‘making it happen’’.

That means informing the chief executive that his position is on the line if he fails to deliver.

With serious failures being made public on a regular basis it is time our chief executive was put on the spot to deliver a regime of competency, rather than the incompetency which seems to have become a standard when major matters are under consideration. debate over the future configuration of local and regional government.

In a tactic commonly employed by people defending spurious arguments, Mr Collins proceeds to quote from legislation as if that will trump common sense. It does not.

Mr Collins has it exactly wrong. If our mayor and councillors were not deeply engaged in this important debate about the future governance arrangements for our city and region, it would be a dereliction of duty.