Watercare board fees would have risen to $75,000 a year from 1 August under the withdrawn paper
Auckland Council’s appointments committee has refused to approve a 33.5 per cent rise in Watercare director fees.
The committee had been set to consider the Watercare director fee increase that Council officers were recommending on Thursday 30 July, however it resolved that the item “be withdrawn and brought back to a future meeting for consideration”.
The Howick & Eastern Post covered that recommendation in full last week.
Committee chair Daniel Newman moved the staff recommendation and Mayor Wayne Brown seconded it, but after members asked questions the two withdrew the motion with the agreement of the meeting.
The proposal would have created a new top pay band for Watercare alone, called Band 1+, lifting its directors’ base fee from $56,160 to $75,000 a year from 1 August.
Tataki Auckland Unlimited and Auckland Transport directors would have moved from $56,160 to $66,440, a rise of 18.3 per cent.
Auckland Future Fund Trustee Limited directors would have stayed around the same, moving from $42,750 to $42,590.
Councillor Richard Hills told the meeting the increases were “wildly inappropriate, especially considering the savings you’re looking to try and find and the pressure everyone’s under”.
Auckland Council chief executive Phil Wilson defended the advice.
“What you’ve got in terms of officer advice is a free and frank, dispassionate professional view about what governance roles are worth in the marketplace,” Wilson said.
He said fees frozen for political reasons had to be caught up later, and that “there’s a big catch up, which is really difficult to traverse”.
Councillor Christine Fletcher was the first to raise withdrawing the paper rather than voting it down.
“My preference would not be that we are voting down officer recommendation, rather so that this paper be withdrawn and perhaps rewritten,” she said.
Newman told the meeting a new paper would be prepared before the item returned.
“I’m foreshadowing that we will work on a situation where we will try and provide a range of advice, including a significantly smaller and staged increase for the committee to debate with a view to trying to get a consensus around that outcome,” he said.
He said his own preference was “not to support the 33 [per cent increase], but mindful of the fact that people do need to be valued”.
Newman told Newsroom after the meeting that the officials’ advice was “completely unrealistic and unacceptable” and would have to be reworked under new principles he would discuss with them the following week.
“I accept, and the committee accepts directors need to be paid something,” he told the outlet.
“But it’s not going to be in the region of what was proposed.”
The committee received Watercare’s third-quarter performance report at the same meeting.
It shows the company met or exceeded 32 of its 36 performance measures in the quarter.
Watercare spent $672.3 million on capital works in the nine months to March, $124.8 million short of its $797.1 million target for the period.
It has cut its full-year capital forecast from $1.05 billion to $937.2 million.
“Capital delivery remains the main performance concern,” the report said.
Community trust in Watercare measured 53.4 per cent against a target of 55 per cent.
It also considered an appointment to the Watercare board with the public excluded, and agreed the successful candidate will be named once the process is finished.
The committee’s next scheduled meeting is on Thursday 27 August.
