Invercargill Mayor Sir Tim Shadbolt is doing his damndest to put the city council’s Legacy Report to bed and move on.
But the Risk and Assurance Committee chair Bruce Robertson said today that it was important that the past 18 months of work done by the council was not “dropped and forgotten.”
A response from the Department of Internal Affairs regarding the proactive steps the ICC was making, to restore trust and confidence in its ability to meet the Crown’s expectation of a high performing council, was overall positive.
General manager of policy and operations for the DIA, Richard Ward said in his report to the committee, that having reviewed the Legacy Rreport, he was satisfied that the council “now has a set of foundational documents, tools and processes to enable it to continue the journey towards being a high performing organisation.”
However, he noted that public confidence in the council was still very low, and that it should continue to focus on turning around this sentiment, by repeating another resident’s survey to measure improvement over time.
His Worship told the meeting, when it was put up for discussion, that he thought the issues had been resolved, and believed they had either been downplayed or the outcomes were not what was expected.
“I think it would be best to leave it alone for awhile,” he said.
Bruce argued that with the council having done the hard yards for the past 18 months (and at cost of $242,000), it was now the committee’s job to monitor the ongoing risk assessments.
“We need to make sure that the gains are still maintained… we are still in the programme but it’s on a different basis – it’s self managing.”
The committee received the final ‘Working on Working Together’ report and the Project Governance Group’s monitoring functions have now been handed over to the Risk and Assurance Committee.
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