Our Infrastructure
Financial Accountability
When you pay money to any organisation or business for goods or services you have the right to ask questions about how your money is spent and whether the way it is spent provides you with the best possible value for your money. The Dunedin City Council is no different. When you pay your rates to the Council, you are accepting in good faith that the services you receive in return will be:
- The best that can be delivered
- The most efficient that can be delivered
- The most suitable for you in your area.
The City Council is largely a monopoly on certain services like drainage, water supply and sewage. You have no other commercial alternative supplier for those services. Therefore, the City Council has an obligation to manage those services at an optimal level for its customers. The South Dunedin flooding example in June 2015 has shown ratepayers and citizens that:
- They weren’t being informed about what their money does in their area
- There was no ability to question the standards of service of the Council’s contractors
- The specifications of service are not given to the public for their information
- The quality of service was not up to the desired standard
All of these issues mean that it is very difficult to be able to ensure that there is accountability over service delivery. This is an issue that hard-working people deserve, and should be changed. First and foremost the City Council is a service delivery organisation managing and maintaining the infrastructure that makes our city function. Citizens trust the Council to make the right decisions and ensure that resources are made available to do the work. The City Council can improve this by:
- Communication to all citizens of what the standards of service are in their area for roads, drainage, sewage, parks, water, street lighting, street cleaning etc.
- Providing details of maintenance schedules in specific neighbourhoods for roads, drainage, sewage, parks, water, street lighting, and street cleaning so that people know when work is being undertaken.
- Encouraging the community to be proactive in reporting issues and poor work.
- Making improvements in contract supervision and reporting to ensure that standards and specifications are met.
- Developing plain English information about the Asset Management Plan and how it affects each community or neighbourhood in the city.
- Having a comprehensive programme that highlights vulnerable roading areas and plans for investment in stabilisation that would improve the conditions of the roads and lessen the need for reactive action and reactive costs during storm events.
- Using land stability options of roads to create biological corridors of vegetation that benefit biodiversity and improve accessibility.
- Undertaking greater advocacy for community needs roads, drainage, sewage, parks, water, street lighting, street cleaning etc.
- Ensuring our parks, playgrounds, reserves and beaches function appropriately and provide for the needs of families and visitors to those reserves.
- Prioritising the rural road network and other rural infrastructure to improve opportunities for economic productivity.
- Improving street cleaning and tagging removal from our city to create a better image of Dunedin.
- Removing waste and inefficiencies to restore credibility in the Council as an asset manager.
Professional Services and Consultancy
For over 100 years the Dunedin City Council had an Engineers Department that was responsible for designing, constructing and maintaining much of the city’s infrastructure. It created a department of vast institutional knowledge and professionals who had “skin in the game” in Dunedin. They lived here, they worked here, their professional reputations were coupled with their lives in Dunedin.
In the early 2000s then City Council Chief Executive Jim Harland sold the City Engineers Department (then called City Consultants) and over 100 years of knowledge and service disappeared from our city. It was one of the worst mistakes this city ever made. The Dunedin City Council are now solely reliant on external consultants for professional services to guide and develop projects, infrastructure and construction. There are many very capable people working in consultancy companies, and for specialised advice it can be appropriate. However, Dunedin has seen mistakes in design, construction and consultation made in large capital projects that have been expensive and difficult to fix. It’s my view that, the City Council should reinvest in the development of a new in-house professional services team to undertake work that would mainly be outsourced to external consultants. This would ensure that people with the right technical ability were managing and overseeing the infrastructure, services and other areas important to the city. They would be accountable to the City Council, their colleagues and the community that they live in.
- The City Council should reinvest in the development of a new in-house Engineers Department to provide internal professional services that would have mainly been outsourced to external consultants.
