Tell you what, if you don't already have much confidence in councils, the report out on what went wrong with sewage spilling into the water at Moa Point in Wellington isn't going to help.

It turns out the Moa Point wastewater treatment plant is only half built. There's another half that was supposed to be built and never was. If it had been built, that spill probably wouldn't have happened because there would have been enough capacity at the treatment plant to cope with the extra rainwater that fell that evening.

Now, we don't know why the second phase was never built. Maybe someone, somewhere along the line in the past 30 years, decided to save some money and shelved it. Or maybe it just got lost on the list of things the council was supposed to do. Maybe, as people left their jobs over the years, someone packed up their desk and forgot to tell the next person, "Oi, can you remember to build the rest of the Moa Point plant?" And so it never got built.

That's a question that perhaps could have been answered by the Chief Infrastructure Officer at Wellington City Council, or maybe the previous Chief Infrastructure Officer, or perhaps their specialist advisers. But none of them made themselves available to be interviewed for this report.

Now, that's suspicious, isn't it? That's the kind of thing you do if you don't want to say something that might be used against you, isn't it?

But here we are once again, with a council dropping the ball on one of its core jobs, in this case treating poo, and then nobody being held accountable. Instead, it's being blamed on systemic issues.

Doesn't that sound exactly like what happened with Tauranga City Council and its failure to act on repeated warnings about the looming landslide that went on to kill people?

Once again, Minister Simon Watts is doing nothing about it. He's simply going to close the book on a sorry chapter and promise that the council is already working on doing better.

Now, I'm getting very tired, and I suspect many of you are too, of councils being really rubbish at their jobs, stuffing up in quite significant ways and then nobody ever getting in trouble for it.

Someone made the decision not to build the second part of the plant, just as someone made the decision not to bother setting up a warning system for a landslide in Tauranga.

I'd like to know who that was, and I'd like them to be made an example of so that other council staffers get a bit of a fright and do their jobs better in the future.

LISTEN ABOVE

Tell you what, if you don't already have much confidence in councils, the report out on what went wrong with sewage spilling into the water at Moa Point in Wellington isn't going to help.
It turns out the Moa Point wastewater treatment plant is only half built. There's another half that was supposed to be built and never was. If it had been built, that spill probably wouldn't have happened because there would have been enough capacity at the treatment plant to cope with the extra rainwater that fell that evening.
Now, we don't know why the second phase was never built. Maybe someone, somewhere along the line in the past 30 years, decided to save some money and shelved it. Or maybe it just got lost on the list of things the council was supposed to do. Maybe, as people left their jobs over the years, someone packed up their desk and forgot to tell the next person, "Oi, can you remember to build the rest of the Moa Point plant?" And so it never got built.
That's a question that perhaps could have been answered by the Chief Infrastructure Officer at Wellington City Council, or maybe the previous Chief Infrastructure Officer, or perhaps their specialist advisers. But none of them made themselves available to be interviewed for this report.
Now, that's suspicious, isn't it? That's the kind of thing you do if you don't want to say something that might be used against you, isn't it?
But here we are once again, with a council dropping the ball on one of its core jobs, in this case treating poo, and then nobody being held accountable. Instead, it's being blamed on systemic issues.
Doesn't that sound exactly like what happened with Tauranga City Council and its failure to act on repeated warnings about the looming landslide that went on to kill people?
Once again, Minister Simon Watts is doing nothing about it. He's simply going to close the book on a sorry chapter and promise that the council is already working on doing better.
Now, I'm getting very tired, and I suspect many of you are too, of councils being really rubbish at their jobs, stuffing up in quite significant ways and then nobody ever getting in trouble for it.
Someone made the decision not to build the second part of the plant, just as someone made the decision not to bother setting up a warning system for a landslide in Tauranga.
I'd like to know who that was, and I'd like them to be made an example of so that other council staffers get a bit of a fright and do their jobs better in the future.
LISTEN ABOVE

With a straight down the middle approach, Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive on Newstalk ZB delivers the very latest news and views to New Zealanders as they wrap up their day.

Heather du Plessis-Allan Drive

Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: I'm really tired of councils stuffing up and no-one getting in trouble for it

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/7e17b129-92c2-4836-9324-b4b90076535d/transcript