PHOTO
Christchurch City Council paid $1250 to a private company to check the spelling of Māori park names instead of using its own expert staff.
The check is part of correcting spelling mistakes on 180 signs at 30 parks across the city.
A member of the public prompted the revisit after notifying the city council of a mistake on a sign at Rāwhiti Domain in New Brighton last year.
One city council staffer spent 12 hours identifying the misspellings. Some names were missing macrons while a couple were completely wrong.
The city council then outsourced a spelling check to mana whenua by providing a list of names.
This was despite having staff at the city council with expertise in te reo Māori.
The city council would not answer why its senior advisor for treaty relationships Ross Paniora (Ngāti Porou, Ngāi Tahu) did not do the spelling check.
Paniora was senior advisor and team leader at the Ministry of Māori Development, deputy principal of Hillmorton High School, and is on the local advisory board for Fire and Emergency. He gave free Māori lessons at the Art Gallery in 2025.
He presented a video on the city council’s website about the spelling corrections, explaining the meaning of a word can change depending on the placement of macrons.
Instead, Tauti Mai Ltd, a company owned by Tuahiwi Marae trustee Lynette Harata Te Aika, invoiced the city council for “te reo translation and te reo Māori editing work” done between last September and November.
Details released to The Star under the Local Government Official Information Act show each hour was billed at $250.
The council was billed for 7.5 hours of work. Five hours of that was devoted to checking park names.
The invoice said work involved “web checks, phone calls, emails, getting validation from (Ngāi Tahu’s) Papatipu Rūnanga and cross-referencing to written documents that were available”.
Te Aika did not respond to requests for comment.
On the extra cost of replacing the incorrect signs, city council head of parks Rupert Bool said there was “no additional cost”, as it would be “absorbed into existing operational costs”.
The city council redacted the cost for physically replacing each sign in its LGOIMA response.
The redaction was “to protect the commercial position of the person who supplied or who is the subject of the information”, a city council spokesperson said.
It will take more than five years for all the signs to be corrected. Bool said signs will be replaced as part of regular renewals due to “wear and tear, vandalism and bylaw changes”.
An extra hour of work by two city council staff members went into correcting spellings on its website. Park staff checked all 1300 park and reserve names.
Staff then researched the parks' history to find the original intent of the name before sending them to Tauti Mai for checking.
Pressed on why the city council needed to outsource the work, a spokesperson said staff asked Ngāi Tūāhuriri as they were “the regional experts” in local names.
“These are Ngāi Tūāhuriri names they gave to places that are in the region they occupied first,” the spokesperson said.
“Therefore, the council checking those names with them first is the right thing to do as it is honouring Ngāi Tūāhuriri, as well as their intellectual property.
That's the partnership between Christchurch City Council and Ngāi Tūāhuriri working as it is supposed to.”
Mayor Phil Mauger was unaware of the spending as it was operational. He would not be drawn on whether it was money well spent.
Said Mauger: “No matter the signage, it’s important we get names right.”