We should always demand that local government runs the ruler across all spending - article rejoinder

As a former (pre-1989, so old-world, prudent-rural-Council) LG Treasurer (no fancy CFO titles back then) I have been quietly appalled at the way in which staff have usurped Councillors.

Part is structural: Councils employ a CEO, who then employs all other staff. So there's an instant disconnect. Councillors tend to be actively discouraged from interacting with staff ('Policy, not execution', 'Governance, not Management' tend to be the shibboleths).

Part is the 'argument from authority' - a fallacy which nevertheless traps many a Councillor into a place whence no real push-back against even plainly loopy staff initiatives is possible.

Part is Council groupthink, especially when essentially tribal voting blocks have propelled 'their' councillors into the fray and proceed as if the 'others' are anathematized.

And part is the huge information and power disparity between staff, and the councillors, committees and especially the public. Taking on City Hall is a losing proposition, so most simply don't bother.

Staff attitudes to councillors can be summed up as 'vote-hungry show ponies around a very distant table'. Who can be and thus all too often are ignored. Calling for 'a staff report' is a recipe for getting handed 'what the staff always wanted', but suitably obfuscated so as to survive the limp surveillance of Der Public, and the occasional inquisition from the latest unpaid intern reporter in a local tabloid.

Against this background, and the 'four well-beings' power of general competence (Sec 10(2) LG Act 2002) it is only to be expected that there is little to no hope of effectively managing increases in Council spend, let alone reducing it. Bureaucracies are remunerated by numbers of staff managed - a built-in growth incentive. It simply hasn't occurred to any of them that there might be Limits to Growth. Or that (as in the older models) significant pools of expertise lie outside the staff echelons, can be tapped for free via committees and co-options, and can thus serve the dual purposes of keeping community connections, and deepening the intellectual horsepower brought to discussions.

So the article's fond hope that "We should always demand that local government runs the ruler across all spending" is quite impracticable, and has been increasingly so for three decades. We are all strapped to the Rates Rocket, every year the uplift increases, and few of us have any trust left in the edifice it's funding.

Maybe the WuHuFlu might be a circuit-breaker in this dismal progression. Maybe the engineers and other unexcitable types on staff might club together and persuade the Event Managers, Tourism Promoters, Community Engagement Fluffballs, and all the rest of the 'Social and Cultural Well-being' parasites, to gracefully yield their comfortable, secure and marginally useful positions in order to fund the unexciting requirements like sewer replacements, well-head securing, bridge strengthening, and public building earthquake-hardening.

But I wouldn't bet the rating tax base on That happening in my remaining lifetime.....

As with the DHB's I think there may well be a Great Reset of the number and distribution of authorities - Councils, Regional's etc. It's simply nuts to have small authorities, each with their own fiercely guarded C-suite, systems, Plans etc - all somewhat inconsistent with each other (District Plans....) - all claiming to be Diffrunt, Speshull, and thus entitled to defend their fiefdoms until Kingdom Come. Whereas in the commercial space, large verticals and franchises tend to have a single shared or multi-tenanted set of systems, extensive supply-chain links via EDI, superb logistics etc. I did some work for a well-known retailer a decade ago, and at that stage, they were doing a weekly forecast of sales for every SKU (around 10,000) in every product category across 100 stores, 3 countries and 3 currencies, complete with expected delivery dates from logistics, landed costs, margin, and local RRP. Councils and DHB's may be able to approach this sort of performance in the best examples, but I suspect the majority are still emailing Excel workbooks around.

One of the saddest aspects of the post-1989 TLA environment is the complete shutting-out of ordinary folks from the business of maintaining their own tiny pieces of the puzzle. In a former life, as well as being a Councillor on the Otautau (pop 3,000) Town Council, I was on the roster of volunteers who ran the local swimming pool. As a County Treasurer, I attended numerous meetings of committees for Water Races, Reserves, Halls as well as the usual Council committees and sub-committees. These all served the dual purpose I outlined above: keeping strong roots in the communities they served, and adding on-the-ground expertise and voices. Nothing like this now exists, and one obvious result is the complete disconnect between the behemoth Councils and the populations they serve. It doesn't take degrees in horticulture to maintain a local garden, keep a local reserve mowed, trees trimmed etc. 

Time for a re-connection.