Howick Ward councillor Bo Burns lost her Community Committee deputy chair role in a reshuffle announced by Mayor Wayne Brown on 3 August, having backed a failed 26 May amendment to cut this year’s rates rise
Howick Ward councillor Bo Burns has lost her deputy chair role on Auckland Council’s Community Committee, one of several changes in a leadership reshuffle announced by Mayor Wayne Brown on 3 August.
Whau councillor Sarah Paterson-Hamlin takes over the role.
Brown said the reshuffle favoured councillors willing to compromise over those who had consistently opposed him.
“It’s really easy to say no, right?” he told The Spinoff.
“It’s really hard to find an alternative.”
North Shore councillor John Gillon also lost a deputy chair role, on the Regulatory and Safety Committee.
Brown called Burns and Gillon “redeemable”, but said they had “consistently voted against him this term on just about every important measure from housing to the annual plan.”
Burns and Gillon put up an amendment at the Council’s budget meeting on 26 May to cut this year’s rates rise from 7.9 per cent to 5.9 per cent, and it failed.
Howick households are paying about $321 more this year under the 7.9 per cent rise.
Speaking for the amendment, Burns told the meeting she had received “hundreds of emails, people stopping me in the street, messages and phone calls from residents”.
“The message has been loud and clear that people are hurting,” she said.
She also questioned the Council’s consultation, telling councillors that “in Howick ward alone, only 617 submissions were received from a population of 180,000 residents”.
“That is a disconnect between council and the people we represent,” she said.
Rodney councillor Greg Sayers, who also backed that amendment, has lost the chair of the Budget and Performance Committee to first-term Albany councillor Victoria Short, the biggest promotion in the reshuffle, and becomes Short’s deputy.
Brown explained that change bluntly, saying “Chris Luxon didn’t put Chloe Swarbrick in as Minister of Finance.”
The Auckland Ratepayers’ Alliance had picked the outcome in a press release on 17 June, spokesman Josh Van Veen saying Brown “plans to use an upcoming committee reshuffle to punish those councillors who dared to vote against his record-high rates increase.”
Burns set out her own view of the Council’s culture in June before the reshuffle, in a public Facebook post on 13 June headed “POLITICS IS NOT AN EXCUSE”.
In it she wrote that she had too often heard “Oh, that’s just politics” offered as cover for personal attacks, bullying, hostility, anger, gossip, or behaviour that would never be acceptable in workplaces.
“Politics should never be an excuse for poor behaviour,” she wrote.
She said she had walked out of situations “where I believed the behaviour and culture being displayed were unacceptable”.
Howick’s other ward councillor, Maurice Williamson, moves from deputy chair of the Budget and Performance Committee to deputy chair of the Audit and Risk Committee.
Burns served six years on the Howick Local Board before her election to the Council in 2025, the final three as deputy chair.
Williamson was first elected to the Council in 2022 and re-elected last year.
