Tiny council’s hiring of PR firm angers
One of New Zealand’s smallest councils has called in a public relations company to respond to media queries.
The Westland District Council (WDC), which serves a region of fewer than 9000 people, announced this week that its media queries would be handled by Convergence, the South Island’s largest public relations company. Company partner Steve Atwood is the contact for media for the West Coast council.
Convergence looks after companies and organisations like the Lyttleton Port, Mike Pero Real Estate and NZ Rugby League.
The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has been investigating WDC for more than a year. In December Deputy Auditor-General Greg Schollum launched an inquiry into the council’s decision to build a $1.3 million stopbank on the floodprone Waiho River, which runs near Franz Josef.
Westland Mayor Bruce Smith and councillor Durham Havill announced they wanted to build a stopbank on the river earlier this year, despite repeated Government and West Coast Regional Council warnings that stopbanks would not solve the problem.
Last year, a Press investigation revealed how a new business run by a cake decorator, which had no waste management track record, won a WDC project to build a $7m Franz Josef sewage plant.
The process was overseen by WDC assets manager Vivek Goel, who stood down when the SFO probe began. Chief executive Tanya Winter resigned over the controversy and was replaced by Simon Bastion in November.
Similar-sized councils around New Zealand do not tend to have dedicated communications staff.
Buller District Council’s media queries are handled by the community services officer, O¯ po¯ toki District Council’s are handled by the Bay of Plenty Regional Council, and Carterton District Council has a marketing and communications coordinator, although a fulltime communications role was expected to be created.
Westland Deputy Mayor Helen Lash said she was furious with the decision to hire a PR firm and knew nothing about it before the announcement. She said she was confident other councillors were also unaware of the decision.
‘‘The council is in no financial position whatsoever to be able to engage such a high-ranking PR company let alone have any solid reason of need. For WDC, any cost would have to be directly rolled over to the ratepayer, which some of us won’t allow.
‘‘We may be addressing this retrospectively at the council table. There will be some meaty questions asked if correct and some serious challenges put up.‘‘
Bastion said he decided to hire Convergence and the appointment had nothing to do with the two government investigations. ‘‘It is purely an operational decision and did not require councillors’ input.’’
Bastion said the firm was hired because the council’s communications adviser had resigned.
‘‘As we only had one person in our communications team we needed to find external capacity until her replacement can be found and commence work.’’
Bastion said Convergence worked only on an ‘‘as-needed’’ basis. ‘‘We cannot predict ahead of time how much that will be or how long it will take to find an in-house replacement, but we fully expect the cost to be well within the wages budget assigned to the inhouse communications position.
‘‘There is no set fee per media release. The time it can take to process a media inquiry varies considerably, depending on the availability of the information and the complexity of the issue.’’
Bastion would not say how much the contract cost, citing the figure as ‘‘commercially sensitive’’.