Going public: Mayor Clive Geddes announce the airport deal on July 8
The Queenstown Airport deal has been the talk of the town for almost a month now. Although the Queenstown Airport Corporation continues to claim its share sell-off is legal, it looks a bit dodgy from an ethical point of view.
I guess at some level mayor Clive Geddes recognises this as he recently urged us via the media to “focus on the transaction, not the process”. Certainly, of all people, the mayor should be looking to uphold the democratic process, not try to distract us from the fact that it was bypassed.
This clandestine airport deal must have been lurking in the background for a while. It is an example of the challenges facing Queenstown Lakes District Council in the age of Council Controlled Organisations.
As local sports groups learned early in their consultations with Lakes Leisure, CCOs tend to be focused on making money. They may claim to have an interest in community outcomes but their main interest is in the financial bottom line.
The advent of the CCO structure puts even more responsibility on our mayor and councillors to consider social and environmental outcomes in their decision-making.
That is, when they get to make decisions at all. In the case of the airport sell-off, it seems most councillors were presented with an apparent fait accompli.
I am surprised and disappointed that so many of our current councillors seem to have cheerfully shrugged off the fact they were sidelined from a process that diluted what was once total community ownership of a strategic asset.
QLDC should have had a wake-up call last month. How is it going to achieve full oversight of its CCOs so that a similar event like the airport sell-off doesn’t happen again?
In this case the CCO structure acted as a mechanism allowing the QAC and some council staff to avoid accountability and transparency, principles fundamental to a healthy democracy.
Few councillors seem to appreciate the far-reaching implications of the airport deal. In fact, council processes seem more than ever to be lacking openness.
At the full May 25 council meeting, 12 of 19 agenda items were discussed behind closed doors in a public excluded session. Some of those 12 items involved the three CCOs: QAC, Lakes Leisure and Lakes Environmental.
None of the open session included items involving CCOs. About one non-public agenda item, councillors were advised by the deputy chief executive/finance manager that a “decision concerned the purchase of shares in QAC and it had habitually in the past been the practice to consider such matters with the public excluded”.
In the coming months we’ll be hearing from councillors seeking re-election. I trust that the ones who think the process around the airport deal was a robust one will be giving us their justifications for turning their backs on democracy.
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