Otago Regional Council chief executive Sarah Gardner this week confirmed the three science staff resigned over a two-week period recently for a ''variety of reasons''.
This comes during a period of consultation on a proposed restructure of several council departments headed by Mrs Gardner, who became chief executive earlier this year.
The council was looking to change the structure of both the stakeholder engagement and policy, planning and consents departments, she said.
''Consultation with a small number of staff potentially affected has been undertaken. Submissions have been received from staff.''
The stakeholder engagement department process was at the stage of confirming the new structure and new roles were advertised.
The council was advertising three manager roles with the titles ''customer experience'', ''community engagement'' and ''channels''.
The policy, planning and consents department proposal was at the point where staff submissions were being considered.
''Redundancy is one possible outcome, but new positions are also proposed.''
All regional council staff had been made aware of the changes, Mrs Gardner said.
The Otago Daily Times asked Mrs Gardner if staff were required to keep the changes secret.
''At that point these changes were proposed rather than final, and primarily out of sensitivity for those potentially impacted we had hoped that some level of confidentiality could be maintained until decisions were made.''
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Having attended more ORC public meetings than I care to think about, I can say with certainty that there has been heaps of ''customer experience'' & ''community engagement'' directed at the ORC and they have acted on very little of it.
Hopefully under the new CEO things are finally changing.
A fresh Chairperson might help things along too.....
Yup can only agree with Fitzroy on this one, boy they have some great titles don,t they. Can someone enlighten me on what ''channels'' are and how a ''channel'' will engage with the community ?