Directives not being addressed, say councillors

The high earthquake risk from ceiling tiles at Nelson’s Civic House is among a number of issues city councillors thought were being addressed, only to find that staff have apparently not followed them up.

Part of the surprise factor for councillors discovering that Civic House had received two earthquakeprone building notices was that elected members had allocated a budget to do remedial work on the tiles to address the risk – and thought that the work was under way.

An asset management plan covering 2018 to 2028 highlighted the risk posed by the tiles, identified by an engineer’s assessment in 2016, and said tile replacements would begin in the 2017-18 financial year and be completed in 2020.

On March 10 this year, an additional $600,000 was allocated for the ceiling tile remediation, and ‘‘investigation . . . to determine the most cost-effective way of resolving this safety issue is under way’’.

The ceiling tiles on the fifth floor of the council headquarters, which is tenanted by a different agency, have already been addressed, according to council chief executive Pat Dougherty.

The issue is not the only one raised by councillors concerned that their requests or directives voted for by the council have not been progressed.

At the audit, risk and finance committee meeting on Tuesday, Nelson mayor Rachel Reese, deputy mayor Judene Edgar and Councillor Gaile Noonan expressed concerns about staff not reporting back in a timely manner, or at all, on issues that elected members had agreed to have addressed.

Edgar asked if it was necessary for the council to make a resolution ‘‘for every action asked [for]’’ from staff.

‘‘[A requested report] was clearly minuted, and yet it didn’t come through,’’ she said.

Reese said she went so far as to re-watch a YouTube video of a previous meeting to confirm that a request had been made of staff.

‘‘It was very clear that the committee was seeking that information in a time-bound manner, that was to be prior to this meeting . . . I would have expected that to have happened,’’ she said.

She said the council needed to be conscious of public scrutiny.

‘‘Discussing something in a workshop is not going to comply with the minutes . . . and it’s very important that when we raise things through a committee process, that they are reported back through a committee process. This is a public process, and we need to make sure we comply with that.’’

Reese also suggested setting resolutions for all action points, if that would assist staff in clarifying action points from meetings.

Noonan said she had found ‘‘a number [of resolutions] over the past year that haven’t been reported’’ back to the council.

‘‘There were some in my area that weren’t reported that I had to raise to bring back to council, so because I was finding those resolutions that hadn’t been reported on, I asked if there was any mechanism that we needed to provide . . . I’m going to ask that question again today.’’

She said the council needed a better system, as ‘‘we apparently don’t have the staff time to pick them up’’.

Councillor Kate Fulton raised similar concerns at a meeting of the full council last week, where she raised sustainable or climatepositive housing measures, something she has raised previously but which she said staff had not reported back on.

Fulton was requesting that staff look into measures in the upcoming housing plan change to support or regulate climate-positive housing – for example, requiring new builds to have rainwater tanks or solar panels.

‘‘As a council, we agreed to look at that,’’ she said. ‘‘At the start of this triennium, we gave that very clear direction to staff to look at those options, and it hasn’t come back yet . . . it was very clearly minuted, and [the mayor] supported that direction, that we needed to get sustainability housing in the nonregulatory and regulatory space on to the agenda, and staff were tasked to go away and look at that.’’

At that meeting, group manager of environmental management Clare Barton said the proposals would be included in a nonregulatory space – a decision which ‘‘wasn’t [made] through a report or a resolution, it’s been through the various workshops that we’ve been having on the Nelson Plan’’.

On Tuesday, Dougherty acknowledged that staff needed to be ‘‘more responsive’’.

‘‘I don’t think a committee should have to pass a resolution for everything. We should be more responsive than that,’’ he said.

‘‘We have already made some changes to the way actions are recorded out of the resolutions to make that more robust. I thought we were getting some resources to look back through resolutions through this triennium, if there’s any we’ve missed.’’