Comments trigger stand down
Fiery comments at an Invercargill City Council meeting about its contract with Recycle South recycling triggered Cr Ian Pottinger’s “time out’’ from his chairmanship of the infrastructure committee.
Pottinger has, by agreement, been absent from that role since mid-December and is not scheduled to return until June.
He and Mayor Nobby Clark were standing firm in their disagreement on whose idea it was for the agreed stand down; each insisting that by their recollection it was the other’s request.
Meanwhile, details have emerged about a tempestuous council meeting on December 13, which was held with the public excluded.
Whether or not it was the sole issue behind Pottinger’s stand down remains unclear, but it was certainly the trigger point.
Email exchanges released by the council in response to media information requests show Clark sent councillors and staff an email after that meeting saying Pottinger had sought some “time out’’, which Clark had approved.
The email chain did not show any immediate dissent from Pottinger to that account. But after Clark repeated his account to journalists, the councillor did protest that the initiative had not been his.
Pottinger clarified one point to Stuff yesterday, that the issue was not a repeat of the series of criticisms he had previously raised. He had been scornful of aspects of WasteNet and the Government’s performance in regional recycling issues.
As had the mayor, at times.
This had been a new matter, Pottinger said. “It was a serious issue - I can’t tell you more, but it was serious enough to have [potentially] stopped our recycling. It was a special topic that needed to be sorted.
“And it has been - because they’re still recycling.’’
Emails showed that after the meeting Clark emailed Pottinger to say that he appreciated the councillor’s advocacy work around WasteNet and about the security of the Recycle South contract, but from his perspective, a statement Pottinger had made about councillors’ “level of ignorance’’ on such issues was inappropriate.
He also wrote that Pottinger had not been prepared to share information with colleagues “as they tried to understand what you were raising’’ and that “you lost a lot of respect in your line of statements and the tone you presented your views’’.
“While I respect that we all have degrees of passion and frustration on many issues, this process did not gather you much support, which was a shame,’’ Clark wrote.
Pottinger replied that the information he didn’t share should have already been included in a report to councillors, and “as I stated during the meeting, no one was prepared to listen and correction was pointless’’.
Pottinger had spoken at the December meeting about contacting the Department of Internal Affairs and writing to the council’s chief executive Michael Day with a complaint regarding the recycling contract regarding, though he later replied to Clark’s email that he would refrain.
“I will keep my powder dry,’’ he added.
“It was a serious issue - I can’t tell you more, but it was serious enough to have [potentially] stopped our recycling.”
Councillor Ian Pottinger