letter to editor

[wattnot]

This is the full text of a letter I wrote to the local paper some
months ago.
They published a bowdlerised version of it.



To: 'in...@thelifestyler.co.nz'
Subject: Mangawhai Ecocare



It is interesting to watch the chickens coming home to roost over this
fiasco.

When I was on the council, fighting to get some transparency and
integrity into the process of selecting contractors for this scheme (I
failed), I managed, on one occasion to get council to agree to a
motion to write to the preferred (Australian, subsequently bankrupted)
bidder raising two points of concern to me, and of sufficient concern
to the rest of council that they took the unprecedented step of
agreeing to a motion from me. The motion was passed, and therefore
has the force of law. At the next council meeting the papers neither
contained a copy of the letter, nor any reference to the resolution
instructing the CEO to write it. At the commencement of the meeting I
tabled my concern and asked the mayor to instruct the CEO (McKerchar)
to produce the letter. He did this, and McKerchar stated, to my
disbelief, that he had decided not to write the letter because
"neogotiations were at a delicate stage' and such a letter might have
scared the bidder off".



After the meeting I wrote to the bidder myself, stating no more than
had been agreed by resolution, except that I added that I had taken it
upon myself to write because unfortunately, owing to a slip-up in
communication, the CEO had not carried out the council's instruction
to do so himself.



The upshot was that I was 1. stripped of all my committee roles, 2.
threatened with "legal" action, and was told 3. that I would be
debarred from any future council meetings that touched on Ecocare.

All I actually did was to write a letter to an Australian company in
compliance with a resolution of council duly passed in committee.



I took some advice, and since the mayor has sole discretion on
committee appointments his decision to sack me from them stood. No
legal action ensued, because there was, in fact, no ground upon which
to bring any, and on item 3, I had my own legal counsel point out to
council that it was actually the voters who decided who attended
council meetings, not a Kanagaroo Court convened in the dead of night
in Dargaville.



The entire Ecocare process, from the featherbed appointment of the
initial consultants to the uncompetitive awarding of all the contracts
for construction has been a model of sleaze and corruption that would
work as a text book for the cosa nostra. The one constant throughout
is the CEO. All the other players have changed.



Mangawhai has a sewage system that is right up there with the sort of
thing that used ot get installed in the 1950s. It has numerous
singularities that will ensure that when failures occur raw sewage
will be discharged in large quantities into the estuary for indefinite
periods- the very thing the euphemistic title of the scheme claimed to
be preventing. Anyone who doubts this need only inspect the resource
consent that council has given itself to enable it to make raw sewage
discharges into the waterways.



Attempts by ratepayers to communicate with McKerchar are routinely
treated with contempt. His initial response is always to ignore any
communication. Then, if pressed (by a fresh copy copying the mayor),
he always claims that he never saw the original and that there must
have been an administrative failure. At this point he does nothing
more, in the hope that the inquirer has now run out of steam and will
go away. If that is not the case, he then fabricates a response that
exonerates himself, utterly regardless of the facts, and he keeps this
up until the complainant either gives up or suicides- to him it
doesn't matter which.