Holdom jumps into third term
New Plymouth mayor Neil Holdom was back in his office on Sunday, unpacking the very boxes he had filled on Friday night.
It was the second time he had gone through the routine, after he surprised himself by winning his first crack at the job in 2016.
His third term was declared late on Saturday afternoon when progress results revealed he had received 9880 votes, 6137 more than the closest challenger, Dinnie Moeahu, while Murray Chong was another 10 votes further back.
By Sunday, when preliminary results were released, his majority had increased to 7778 over Chong, who had moved into second place.
Holdom had a level of confidence about returning for a third term, though he admitted to a few anxious moments as he rode his mountainbike through the forests on the outskirts of New Plymouth while waiting to hear the results.
‘‘I thought Dinnie and Murray performed really well and my plan was just to do the best I could,’’ he said. ‘‘When I was riding around in the forest and the phone wasn’t ringing, it’s quite weird because you do have a bit of knot in your guts.’’
That knot was unravelled when the phone did ring with the news that he had an unassailable lead.
He was ‘‘stoked with the margin’’, which he believed had given him and the council the mandate to continue the major infrastructure work that made up so much of the last Longterm Plan and brought hefty rate hikes.
Holdom, who celebrated his 50th birthday this year with the acquisition of a new e-bike, was equally delighted that all the council candidates who had sought reelection would be back around the table for another term, including Moeahu, Chong, former mayor Harry Duynhoven, Gordon Brown, Sam
Bennett, Anneka Carlson, David Bublitz, Tony Bedford and Amanda Clinton-Gohdes. Marie Pearce, the only candidate for the Kōhanga Moa general ward, was elected unopposed.
‘‘It says to me that we are on track and the community gets what we are trying to achieve,’’ Holdom said.
‘‘We have to do these things, even if they are not popular. Noone likes paying more tax, but it has to be done, and I think the team looks really good.’’
The new faces on the council are: Max Brough, who unsuccessfully campaigned for the mayoralty in 2019; educationalist Bali Haque; radio journalist Bryan Vickery; and Te Waka McLeod, who won the newly established Te Purutanga Mauri Pūmanawa Māori ward.
Voter turnout, however, appeared to be low, with only 30.1% of ballot papers returned as of Thursday. Nationally, turnout was 36%.
Reflecting on his third election campaign, Holdom said he had felt the personal nature of it at times.
He was accused by some candidates of being absent from his job too often, and of lacking presence in the community, and he was also accused of trying to find a management position on the proposed Three Waters entity board.
‘‘It is a race, and I used to race bikes, so you do try and block out all the distractions and focus on the track in front of you and what you need to do,’’ he said.
‘‘That’s what I tried to do. You sit there and listen to some of it and think, ‘Wow,’ but that’s not what I wanted to do.
‘‘I didn’t want to engage with them on that.’’
Prior to announcing he would stand for a third term, Holdom said there were periods when he simply did not want to run again.
This was especially so after the ‘‘quite scary’’ criticism that he and his family copped for his involvement in the multimilliondollar funding of the Green School in Oakura through the Government’s Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund.
Holdom had written a letter to support the school’s application for government funding because of its economic benefits to the region. The money, $11.7 million, was later changed to a loan.
However, after getting through that period, Holdom said he realised it does take three terms to really ‘‘bed things in’’ and he was now looking ahead to a challenging period in which inflation could have a major impact on projects moving forward.
‘‘We have pushed the rates as high as they can go, and it’s not sustainable to push them any higher,’’ he said.
Despite that insistence, projects such as Destination Play, which involved a $5.5m redevelopment of Kawaroa Park into one of the largest playgrounds in the southern hemisphere, and the Tūparikino Active Community Hub, a $90m sports and recreation development at the New Plymouth Raceway, remain priorities.
As for a deputy mayor to replace Richard Jordan, Holdom said it was a decision he would not be addressing until after he had sat down with all councillors either side of a planned holiday with his family in Christchurch.