Wood shuns board’s secret meeting stance

Veteran politician George Wood walked out of a Devonport-Takapuna Local Board meeting last week, angered that two workshops were being held as confidential sessions rather than open public meetings.

The workshops – discussing council-arm Auckland Emergency Management (AEM) and its flood response and operations and a later briefing on local board services – continued with the media and public excluded.

Wood later told the Observer he was not happy that important topics were being dealt with in secret at the behest of council staff. New board members were being pressured and he said: “I for one, wasn’t going to sit there and be a stoolie [stool pigeon] with Terence [Harpur] in the chair.”

Board chair Toni van Tonder, who participated in the meeting by Zoom because she was at home unwell, said she was satisfied the workshops were correctly taken into private session under provisions of the Local Government Official Information and

Meetings Act (LGOIMA). Staff advice on doing this was sound, she said.

Wood could make his own choices, but she added “he missed an important debrief”.

Reasons cited under LGOIMA for making the meetings confidential were to maintain effective conduct of public affairs through the free and frank exchange of opinion and to protect persons involved, including staff, from improper pressure or harassment.

“I’m not interested in staff being publicly vilified,” van Tonder said. The AEM session had been tense, with strong views expressed, she said.

During the term of the last board, both van Tonder and Wood opposed open workshops. After they and four new board members were elected in October (three on a ticket with van Tonder), van Tonder surprised by retaining the open workshops reinstated by former board chair Ruth Jackson in 2021, saying she had come round to the idea.

Jackson on her Heart of the Shore plat- form has publicly questioned why the new board has returned to some closed sessions.

Wood told the Observer that given this board had opted for open workshops his view was “If they’re going to do it one way do it, or do it the other way, but be fair and consistent, rather than have reasons that don’t stack up.”

Van Tonder said some on the board favoured closed workshops. She was trying to keep them open as much as possible for public information flow, but the reality was, as one of the city’s few boards that had open workshops, council staff were wary about coming along to them.

A session such as the one on AEM would not have happened if it were open and the likes of financial discussions that were not finalised but impacted groups needed to be initially handled in confidence, she said.

The Observer attends most open board meetings and will continue to track the use of LGOIMA to declare them off limits.

Better planning would be a fine thing

I wish to refer to the article printed in the March 31 issue of the Rangitoto Observer [about accessiblity issues at Milford Beach Reserve]. I concur with everything written and would like to add that it is also ablebodied children and young people using the park who are disadvantaged because of Auckland Council’s incompetent design and maintenance.

A number of years ago a basketball court and hoop were built in the reserve. It was hugely popular, but every time it rained the court filled with water and because there was no drainage included, the court filled with water and couldn’t be used for days (and in winter sometimes for weeks).

The average home owner/gardener would be able to tell the council that a simple sump