Coast Regional Council annual report to be debated in secret

Nicole Mathewson Reporter from The Press

From local democracy reporter Brendon McMahon:

The public will be excluded from open debate when the West Coast Regional Council receives and adopts the draft 2022 annual report tomorrow - three months late.

Keeping the report behind closed doors is being justified by council management as something the auditor requires.

Last week the council's Risk and Assurance Committee 'workshopped' the draft report for several hours "line by line" after a planned extraordinary meeting in December to finalise the report was shelved.

Chief executive Heather Mabin said this morning there was nothing untoward with the draft and discussing it in the confidential meeting was "just the auditor insisting it must be adopted in-committee".

"We are not driving this classification to in-committee."

Mabin confirmed staff severance was mentioned in the report as this was a financial reporting requirement.

Reporting of the controversial agreement between the council-owned VCS Ltd and the council chairman's own company Birchfield Minerals regarding the future sale of the Grey Valley dredge, had again been disclosed in the annual report, as it had been prior to it dropping off the annual report in recent years.

Risk and Assurance Committee chairperson Frank Dooley said today he did not know why it had been placed in the in-committee section tomorrow and he would be questioning it.

It was a council document and he could see no justifiable reason for it not to be discussed in public.

"I don't know why. That is a question I have for the chief executive. I believe that the audit report should be adopted in the public meeting, and I will be moving that way."

Dooley said most of the glitches in the report had been "ironed out" last week during the workshop.

If the auditor wanted to discuss an aspect of the annual report in public excluded that could be done without having to excluded the rest of the annual report, he said.

"The balance should be in open meeting. If the document is going to be adopted it's a public document...It's not the auditors document, it's the document of the council and a review of council's performance."

The regional council changed auditors last year from Audit NZ to Ernst and Young.

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