Row over funding for kids’ sport
Dylan Cleaver and Dana Johannsen look at the festering dispute between a large South Auckland sports trust and the government agency set up to oversee it
Last-ditch efforts are being made to save a loveless arranged marriage between one of the country’s largest community sport providers and a charitable trust set up by the Government to oversee it.
Auckland councillors and South Auckland stakeholders are involved in talks to try to repair the damaged relationship between regional sports trust Counties Manukau Sport and proxy government agency Aktive Auckland Sport and Recreation.
The dispute goes to the heart of funding issues for community and grassroots sport and is being watched closely by sports administrators around the country, although requests for ministerial intervention have been ignored.
Aktive was formed in 2012 as an umbrella organisation over Auckland’s four regional sports trusts (RSTs) — Counties Manukau Sport, Harbour Sport, Sport Waitakere and Sport Auckland — and a number of programme providers.
Aktive allocates government money to community groups and sports organisations who apply for funding. It also has service provider agreements with the RSTs so they can deliver programmes in their communities.
Counties Manukau Sport ( CMS) has been at odds with the organisation almost since inception and the two recently failed to come to terms on a service provider agreement. CMS was offered a 12-month contract compared to the three-year terms offered to the other Auckland RSTs, which was rejected.
“We have asked repeatedly for clarity around the specifics of why we haven’t been offered a three-year term,” said CMS chairman Nick Fletcher. “We have been given vague reasons around confidence and trust but no specific information that we can address. We have never been in breach of contract and frankly we have not received a satisfactory answer from them.”
Fletcher said the continuity of services provided to the South Auckland community was uppermost in his mind, but funding from Sport New Zealand, channelled through Aktive, was clearly important in achieving that aim.
A press release, seen by the Herald, was sent to some stakeholders. It said Aktive and CMS “have been unable to reach agreement on the provision of community sport services”, but delivery agreements have been signed off by Auckland’s three other regional sports trusts.
“For two years we have been working collaboratively with Sport NZ, Auckland Council and the four Auckland RSTs to co-create a new strategy,” Aktive chief executive Sarah Sandley said in the statement.
“This new approach requires some changes in the ways RSTs work and which groups they focus on and, unfortunately, we were unable to reach an agreement with CMS to continue with them as a delivery partner. We are now looking at alternative providers.”
That doesn’t wash with many in South Auckland who believe this is another slight on an under-resourced region that needs sport as a vehicle for many of its young, particularly those slipping through the cracks in the education system.
“Aktive have thrown their toys out of the cot,” said Rick Pickard, chief executive of Sir John Walker Find Your Field of Dreams. “Counties Manukau Sport have then thrown their toys out of the cot.
“What we need is for some tough love and Sport New Zealand to show some real leadership and get them back together.”
Fletcher said he had written to Sport and Recreation Minister Jonathan Coleman expressing concerns that the administrative machinery at Aktive was sucking money out of community sport and asking him to intervene in their dispute.
Coleman kicked the issue to Sport NZ management. They wrote back to Fletcher saying they didn’t feel anything warranted investigation.
“We can’t lose 26 years of CMS experience being kicked out the door,” said Pickard. “They have been a leading RST for a long time.”
Sir John Walker Find Your Field of Dreams runs independent programmes for South Auckland children, including eight swimming lessons a year through school years four to seven.
They run a couple of programmes with CMS, including a programme at the Homai school for those who are blind or low-vision.
“The losers in this will be the children and they’re the ones who can least afford it,” Pickard said. “We don’t need bureaucrats, we need people who are passionate about the kids.”
Alf Filipaina, councillor for the Manukau ward, is hopeful the differ-
ences between the two parties can still be resolved. He and Auckland Council representatives have met the boards of Aktive and CMS in an effort to understand the issues that led to the breakdown.
“We are playing a role in trying to resolve this, it is really up to those two, but we are always there.
“We hope they can find a resolution that fits both organisations, but more importantly what fits our communities and Counties Manukau,” Filipaina said.
Aktive describe themselves as a “key strategic partner of Sport NZ, Auckland Council and major grant makers and funders [ who] invest more than $8m per annum in a range of delivery partners, organisations and projects that will get more people recreating [sic] and playing sport in Auckland”.
They have been accused of acting like a corporate by paying board fees and executive-level salaries. Their last annual report shows they paid out board fees of $90,000, including $30,000 to chairwoman Raewyn Lovett.
“At Counties Manukau our board fees were a bottle of wine at Christmas,” said former CMS chairman David Kennedy. “They should be doing that job because they want to do it. There are plenty of qualified people who would stand on that board for free if they thought it was going to assist the community.”
Five key management staff received around $770,000 in salaries, an average more than $150,000 per person. Sandley countered that Aktive is saving some organisations hundreds of thousands of dollars through the efficiencies created by its shared services programme.
“If you want an organisation to do the things that we are charged with doing, of course that requires some staffing, but we had as a KPI a reduction of (our) expenditure as a percentage of turnover and you will see in our annual reports . . . that it is going down each year.”
Some feared that talking on the record about Aktive could threaten their funding. One source said the sole outcome of its creation has been to add another layer of bureaucracy in an already crowded market.
The source said the only problems with Aktive were that “the process behind setting it up was wrong, the delivery was wrong, the people involved were wrong and the outcomes were wrong”.
According to their annual report to June 2016, Aktive received $9.8m in grants from the Government, Auckland Council and gaming trusts. It paid $7.2m in community funding, meaning roughly one dollar in every four is being spent on administration.
Sandley defended that figure by pointing to the extra money going into community sport.
“If you look at the collective turnover before Aktive existed and now, it is up 40 per cent.
“Millions of extra dollars have come into the region, which suggests that actually by people focusing on their specific area, you’ll get better results . . . so I don’t think that criticism is warranted.”
Kennedy, who worked as chief executive for the Eden Park Trust before going to Ngai Tahu in a property acquisitions role, said he left CMS in part because of ongoing frustrations with Aktive.
“They said, ‘We’ll come in and create efficiencies, we’ll lower costs and put that extra money back into the community.’ How were they going to lower our costs? We don’t have any overheads. They’ve just created a need for administration.
“They just take money from us that used to come from Sport New Zealand to reflect a saving that isn’t there.”