Council pushes on with directorship policy

An Invercargill city councillor who attempted to question whether councillors should be on council-controlled organisations was shut down at a full council meeting this week.

Councillors were discussing the appointment and remuneration of directors policy at a meeting on Tuesday. It’s a controversial policy that’s come up several times, with the auditorgeneral recommending councils avoid the practice where possible.

In fact, the council also sought independent advice on the policy, which came saying councils could have control through appropriately appointed independent directors and recommended the number of elected members on Holdco be reduced.

The recommendation put to the council was to amend the policy to extend the appointments committee’s duties, allowing the council to strengthen its control over the director appointment process for all councilcontrolled trading organisations.

The current policy has the council appoint the council appointees to Holdco, with the independent Holdco directors and directors of other councilcontrolled organisations decided by Holdco.

When the matter was opened up for discussion, Cr Allan Arnold tried to raise the issue again of whether the council should have councillors as directors of the holding company.

However, council chief executive Clare Hadley shut down his query saying she thought the matter was out of scope for the discussion on the day.

Hadley said the same question had been put to her before the meeting from another councillor, and her advice was that it would not be in line with the standing orders, as there had been no notice of it as a point of discussion.

‘‘Given that you’ve discussed it within the last 12 months, I believe you would need to give a notice of motion or a request for a report from the chief executive on what might have changed.’’

Cr Lindsay Abbot sought a clarification that councillors were not setting any remuneration at the meeting, which Mayor Tim Shadbolt confirmed was the case.

Cr Ian Pottinger asked if the appointment committee, which was responsible for selecting the directors, would be provided with one preferred candidate or a shortlist.

Hadley said it was her expectation that the committee would see a shortlist and a recommended candidate from it.

Pottinger, echoing Arnold, asked why the council resolved to implement a number of recommendations from the independent report except for the one that recommended that the council reduce the number of councillor directors to Holdco to enable a majority of independent directors.

‘‘This policy does come under review and we have the ability before the next triennial in October to revisit this,’’ Pottinger said.

He indicated he would like to join with Arnold in bringing that back to the council for discussion.

All councillors voted in favour of adopting the recommendation.