Enough of this myopic oversight

Abudget, said Herbert Hoover, should be balanced not by more taxes, but by the reduction of follies. The Invercargill City Council’s project planning and management have been a financial folly-fest in recent years, disclosed in a series of reports from new-ish chief executive Clare Hadley.

Stony questions need to be answered about the possible $4.5 million cost over-run on the council’s Don St investment property, and also the glum revenue prospects from disappointing tenancy uptakes. As things rather shakily stand, it won’t break even until 2021, by which time debt repayment can proceed at full trickle.

For an $11.9 million construction project to be shaping up closer to $18.2 million only deepens the impression of longstanding laxity in council systems.

Hadley makes the rather wan assurance-of-sorts that there really, truly had been project management for Don St but it ‘‘may not have been the right project management’’.

You think?

Cr Ian Pottinger rightly asserts that the inquiry needs to be conducted, as planned, by applying scrutiny from outside the council’s own staff. But he adds that it would not be a witch hunt.

The thing is, systems don’t just create themselves, or function, by some inscrutably organic process. Sometimes necessary lessons about good or poor practices cannot be usefully arrived at without looking squarely at the performance of the practitioners.

Even in advance of the upcoming inquiry, Hadley has acknowledged that better identification of changes to future projects and a more detailed reporting system to keep the council – and public – informed are needed.

Her report highlights that the building had become larger and more costly without any records showing the council approving this. The escalations for the Don St project had been noted, but not explained, in reports in 2015, 2016 and 2017.

And surely the ‘‘not explained’’ bit leaves not only those who prepared the reports, but councillors themselves, with some explaining to do.

Were explanations not insisted upon? If not, why not? Might this be poor communication from the council staff? Equally poor comprehension skills by councillors? A collective sense that the buck stops . . . over there somewhere?

A further batch of questions arise from the Chinese Gardens project in Queen’s Park, now halted in the face of projected costs increasing from $600,000 to $882,000.

This project is Invercargill’s half of a reciprocal arrangement with sister-city Suqian, in China, where a garden with a southern NZ theme is 80 per cent completed. Ours struck opposition from the outset and there’s already been a measure of scaling-back the originally envisaged design. A halt is justified, a bottom-line explanation is warranted, and a rethink of what can be delivered is likely necessary.

However, the project should resume not as a matter of currying favour but because the garden would enhance one of Invercargill’s finest attractions (no small thing) and because when a city makes a commitment it should live up to it (no small thing either).

The ICC under Hadley has undergone considerable staffing changes and to some extent might be said to be a tad different to the organisation that goofed in these cases.

It better be, given that it’s embarking on a massive CBD upgrade in partnership with the rather more disciplined-looking H W Richardson Group.