Acting chair of the Wellington Water Committee Ros Connelly.
Photo: RNZ / Reece Baker
- The acting chair of the Wellington Water Committee says uncovering the extent of money lost in the agency’s contracting and consulting process is “onerous” and will hamper critical work
- Upper Hutt mayor Wayne Guppy says an assurance of high level analysis of costs “smacks of a fob off”
- Chief exec Pat Dougherty says a more rigourous tendering process will slow work going out
- Wellington mayor Tory Whanau says there is no longer an “appetite” for changes to the agency’s board
The acting chair of the Wellington Water Committee says a figure of the amount of money lost by the agency’s lack of a competitive tendering process “just does not exist”.
In an at times tense meeting of the committee on Friday, Ros Connelly said making the agency review the cost of contracts for work over the last five years was “onerous” and would distract the agency from addressing the many problems facing the region’s water infrastructure.
The water supply agency was the subject of two reports showing significant inefficiencies and a lack of value for money this month.
Connelly said a figure for the money lost “just does not exist”.
“We’re going to be searching for something that does not exist and that’s going to be costing us a significant amount of time and money. The best we can do is try to assess the projects that we have undertaken and what efficiency’s we can gain moving forward,” Connelly said.
‘We’re not going to get this money back’ – Ros Connelly
Connelly said the organisation had gone “above and beyond” with the value for money reports provided but solving the problems identified would take money to fix.
“We don’t want to take Wellington Water away from their very critical work of water, waste water and non compliant waste water treatment plants, and have them going through accounting of the last five years projects.
“We’re not going to get this money back. That is patently ridiculous. The fact that the process was not delivering market value does not mean we’re going to get the money back.
“The only course of action is that if the Commerce Commission finds there has been cartel behaviour they may pursue a court case that may result in some refunds but that is going to take years and years. I think it’s unduly onerous to ask Wellington Water to fix it,” Connelly said.
But Upper Hutt Mayor Wayne Guppy said an amendment that the agency would provide “high level analysis” to councils on costs “smacks of a fob off”.
“Our role here is about accountability. The whole of Wellington wants to know how much they’ve been ripped off,” Guppy said.
Competitive tendering will slow work
Wayne Guppy.
Photo: RNZ / Reece Baker
Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dougherty said they would act immediately ensure a more competitive tendering process.
“Everything for the rest of this financial year is to have a competitive element to it. That may be – for smaller jobs – getting three quotes, it may be full competition or, if it’s specialist work, a closed tender but we will have an element of competition,” Dougherty said.
Dougherty acknowledged that the more rigourous process could slow work going ahead.
“This is the trap we always fall into – it’s get the projects out the door – and we’ve lost focus on value for money so there needs to be a trade off.
“Our model has been that we would go to the consultant and contractors panel and say ‘here’s the list of work for the year’ and they would tell us the contractor and consultant that was going to do it. Then we would negotiate a price with them based on an engineer’s estimate and what we paid last year.
“The suspicion is that we have drifted away from real market prices. We don’t know in some areas what a value for money price would look like and that’s what we are trying to recover very quickly,” Dougherty said.
Commissioner Rawiri Faulkner pressed Dougherty on the “trade off” between competitive pricing and efficient work.
“I don’t believe getting rigour and tension in the process, the consequence of that should be a trade off in either quality, price [or] ability to deliver. I’m struggling to reconcile that,” Faulkner.
“We’re playing catch up “- Pat Dougherty
Pat Dougherty
Photo: Supplied / Wellington Water
Dougherty said the growth of work facing the agency had outstripped the agency’s tendering model.
“It’s not good, there’s no doubt about that, and that’s one of the problems is we’re now moving to fix quickly.
“My preference would have been to have had some element of competitive bidding from the first day and then you always know what the market’s paying but we don’t have that information… and now we’re playing catch up.
“Until we have enough data to be able to talk about value for money we will be tendering work and unfortunately that means we slow down. The work will still go out but it just going to be a bit delayed by the tendering, tender evaluation and the tender award process,” Dougherty said.
Wellington Water commits to ‘rebuilding the relationship and trust’ with councils
Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau and most councillors, aside from Diane Calvert, Nicola Young, Tony Randle and Nureddin Abdurahman, wrote to shareholding councils on last week asking it to remove Nick Leggett as board chairperson, saying they did not have confidence in him, and the public was right to be angry.
At Friday’s meeting, Whanau said she understood there was not the appetite to make changes to the agency’s board at this stage.
But Whanau said there was still the need for “rebuilding of the relationship and trust” between the agency and Wellington City Council.
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