They’re commitments Queenstown Lakes mayor-elect John Glover’s making after beating incumbent Glyn Lewers at last weekend’s council elections.
After three failed bids to get on to council, Glover, who lives in Kinloch, near Glenorchy, became the first person in Queenstown’s modern history to bowl a one-term mayor.
Surprised by his win, let alone his 1256-vote (pre-special votes) margin over Lewers, he says "the message we heard and probably all the candidates heard is you ignore the community at your peril, and I think our community wasn’t being listened to".
"And as we saw from the Taxpayers’ Union poll, a significant number of people felt the district’s going in the wrong direction, and they see the elected representatives as the people responsible for that."
Glover says rates rises, and ratepayers’ concerns their money wasn’t being spent well, were key messages heard on the campaign trail.
Asked if he’d target an under-10% rates rise, he says "I think we should start at 5%, given we’ve had such big rises, but we might have to make some hard decisions".
Considering the government’s looking at a rates cap, he says "if the law was we could only do 5%, what would that make us change?"
"Because constraints, in my view, bring innovation or different ways of thinking, and they challenge, ‘this is what we’ve done’.
"I think we have to question what we do, from how we buy things, how we pay people to put pipes in the ground, the size of the contracts we issue."
He reiterates what he suggested during the campaign that council employ a chief operations officer who’d drive projects and drive value.
"If I had a decent contract negotiator and you were paying them $200,000 a year, they’d probably save millions, because I don’t think we get a fair price for the things we pay for."
Glover’s also keen for anyone with expertise to volunteer to help with a "financial reset".
Though council’s near its debt threshold he says that’ll reduce when some debt’s moved to a new water entity, creating more head room, "but we have to use the opportunity to not spend to that".
He’s also floating the idea of a Queenstown ‘infrastructure bond’ to attract long-term investors.
Though he and his councillors are two weeks from being sworn in, Glover says they’ve already talked about how trust in the council can be improved.
"I’ve asked that my diary is public so anyone can see what I’m doing, who I’m meeting and why, to the point if somebody doesn’t want their meeting to be noted in public, I’d be exceptionally reluctant to meet them.
"There shouldn’t be anything to hide.
"So there’s little things we can do like that to start a very long journey to try and restore trust."
Mindful of concerns over fast-track housing, in particular, Glover’s also asking council officers what scope they’ve got for input into the government-led process.
"The worst thing would be when the community don’t support quite significant projects and elected representatives haven’t had a chance to have an input."
During the campaign, Lewers expressed fears the regional deal he’d helped hammer out between the government and the Queenstown Lakes District, Central Otago District and Otago Regional councils wouldn’t survive a change in the mayoralty.
Glover says the deal’s future shouldn’t come down to one person.
"I’m very clear it’s a regional deal, it’s not Queenstown-centric, it’s actually for our district and the region, and a deal implies it works for everybody.
"If it’s an ‘I win, you lose’, that’s not really a deal, that’s a Donald Trump type of deal."
He adds it’s still "very early days — the parties are only just starting to eyeball each other".
The at-times nasty campaign also saw concerns raised Lewers’ council had already, supposedly secretly, appointed a consultant recruiter to help select outgoing CEO Mike Theelen’s successor.
Glover’s already asked for the terms of reference and timeline and is keen for councillors to have input into the skills and attributes they want the next CEO to have, "and that would be the brief you’re giving to the recruiter".
Theelen’s finishing in February, however Glover says "I think not being in a rush is important so it enables the space to get the right person".
"There are a lot of former chief executives in New Zealand who [could] come and fill in for exactly this sort of thing."
As to his top priority, Glover says it’s "landing the team of councillors".
"Because if we need to be effective in leading change, we need to be able to work together, understand each other, play to each other’s strengths, learn from each other.
"It’s probably an organisation’s worst nightmare, isn’t it, having a team of really good, high-performing, empowered councillors."
