Reading a bitter pill, but good medicine for mayor
This week’s confirmation that the Wellington City Council was pulling out of the $32 million Reading deal was both shocking and entirely expected.
Expected, because the pile of evidence mounting against it was turning into a mountain. But shocking, because it required mayor Tory Whanau – to her credit – to swallow the bitterest political pill and effectively admit she got it wrong.
Reopening Reading and breathing life back into the ailing Courtenay Place was widely seen as her legacy. It was certainly a cause she was passionate about. The back-down was a big blow.
Whanau said it was council chief executive Barbara McKerrow who made the final call to pull the plug, but it is hard to believe that the mayor didn’t have some informal hand in it.
It is likely that McKerrow, looking at the mounting evidence, was uncomfortable with signing it off, meaning it would have to go to another vote. This time, supporter Tim Brown would have voted against it and councillor Ben McNulty was also looking likely to jump across to opposition.
Chances are, that vote would have been lost. It was better to front-foot it with a statement from the council confirming the cancellation and Whanau calling it “disappointing, but the right one”.
Since Whanau, just days into the job, sat down with the millionaire US owners of Reading, more and more details have emerged that cast a cloud over the deal.
First, it was leaked that an October closed meeting “city activation” agenda item was actually about the council buying the land under Reading. While the financial aspects of the meeting could have been held in private, the substance of the discussion should have been public – this was after all a talk about using public money to bail out a private business.
That leak led to Whanau starting a code of conduct investigation into five councillors. For a mayor who campaigned on bringing cohesion to the council, this was war.
For four of them – Diane Calvert, Ray Chung, Tony Randle and Nicola Young – it was a bit of a laugh. But for the fifth, Iona Pannett (who would no more leak information than drive a monster truck) it was farce and an attack from a fellow left-leaning colleague.
The $43,000 investigation failed to find the leak, and it only served to drive deeper divisions around the council table.
Amid the investigation came another leak: The council was going to buy the land for $32m and Reading had the option within 10 years of buying it back at the same price (and pocketing any capital gain). If serious alarm bells were not ringing by now, they should have been.
Then another leak: The council was looking to sell money-making land to fund the Reading deal.
Then it was revealed that the Reading parent company lost $150m in the past three years and claims, by the council, that the deal was fiscally neutral were farcical: It was looking to sell moneymaking land and, assuming Reading bought the land back in 10 years, the council would lose any capital gain.
There were of course positives to the deal: That stretch of Courtenay Place has been a dead zone since Reading closed in 2019 and, if all went exactly to plan, this deal would bring life back to it. But there were a lot of ifs.
So when Whanau said cancelling the deal was “right” she was effectively saying she was wrong. It was embarrassing. It was a back-down. But a mayor who is willing to look at the facts and say – if not in so many words – they got it wrong is refreshing.
If only it happened months and thousands of dollars sooner.