Tauranga City Council has formally accepted every finding and recommendation of the independent review into the landslide that killed six people at the Mount Maunganui Beachside Holiday Park in January, and councillors used most of Tuesday’s meeting to ask senior staff how warnings about the slope above the campground were allowed to sit in the organisation for more than two decades without anyone acting on them.
The review by retired High Court judge Paul Davison KC, released in August, found the deaths on 22 January were preventable and that geotechnical consultants had described the danger to the campground repeatedly since the late 1990s. He put the failure down to the way the council worked rather than to any one person, found no individual accountable, and made 10 recommendations to the council and another five aimed at emergency response agencies.
Chief executive Marty Grenfell told the meeting the council accepted the findings “without qualification” and would implement every recommendation. In a statement issued after the vote, he said the council’s first thoughts remained with the six who died.
“Our first thoughts remain with the six people who lost their lives, and with their families, loved ones and everyone affected by this devastating tragedy,” Grenfell said. “Nothing can undo the loss that has been suffered.” He said the review was clear about the need for significant and enduring change. “We accept the findings and we accept responsibility for acting on them.”
The harder questions came from around the council table. Deputy mayor Jen Scoular, who represents the Mount Maunganui ward, asked Grenfell whether he was surprised that Davison had described failures running right across the organisation. According to Local Democracy Reporting, Grenfell first said the findings were Davison’s and he accepted them, and only after further pressing said he was “obviously very, very disappointed” that the council’s systems and decision making had failed to push the information upwards.
Scoular then put the same question to the general managers. Regulatory and community services general manager Sarah Omundsen said she was “really disappointed” the information had not been escalated and dealt with. Strategy, partnerships and growth general manager Christine Jones, who has worked at the council since 2001, said it was “disappointing” to learn of material she had not previously known about. Operations and infrastructure general manager Reneke van Soest, who is the accountable manager for the mountain and the campsite, said she was in her eighth or ninth week in the role when the slope gave way.
Asked what would help staff in the middle of the organisation raise an alarm, van Soest told the meeting the problem started well before any escalation process. “Escalation of a risk requires that you understand it, that you know what your escalation requirements are, and that you feel psychologically safe to do so,” she said, in comments reported by RNZ. “People received reports but very few actually understood the gravity of what was said in those reports. That means we haven’t appropriately helped our staff understand these things.”
Grenfell told RNZ’s Checkpoint that no senior staff had seen the geotechnical reports at the time. “These reports were never escalated to a point where anybody at a senior level within the organisation could provide guidance, direction, and ensure that they were appropriately managed,” he said.
Councillors also went after the detail. Councillor Glen Crowther said he could not find monitoring reports for the mountain covering 2022 to 2024 and asked what had happened to them. Grenfell said he did not have an answer. Scoular raised staff training, noting the review found people did not hold the qualifications their roles required, and asked how appointments were checked. Grenfell said contracts were normally signed by a manager, but these fell inside a restructure that affected 160 staff and removed 110 jobs. “Anybody that was appointed to a position as part of that restructure process essentially was appointed by me as the chief executive,” he said.
There was a short argument over whether the council should accept the report at all while other formal processes are still running. Councillor Rick Curach asked whether accepting the findings without qualification was wise given the government inquiry, the police and coronial process and the WorkSafe investigation are all incomplete. General counsel Andrew Hough said there was a real difference between accepting the report and merely noting it, because accepting it implied agreement with the findings, and warned councillors away from arguing the facts that the government inquiry will examine. The councillors voted to accept.
What the council has committed to is an Organisation Improvement Programme built around four workstreams covering culture and partnerships, its risk framework, systems and reporting, and emergency management. It says it has already assessed landslide risk across the sites it controls, introduced trigger action response plans and severe weather controls at higher risk locations, and given the Audit and Risk Committee a wider brief that includes site visits and testing whether controls work rather than taking assurances on paper.
It has also gone back through its own filing. About 21,000 records from the last four years of council activity have been reviewed, turning up 479 documents of potential relevance across roughly 120 projects, of which 23 were flagged as high priority and read in detail. The council says that sweep has not found any new or previously unknown risk to life.
A detailed implementation plan with costs, staffing and governance arrangements is due back to the council on 22 September, and the council says it will start reporting publicly on progress from October.
Mayor Mahé Drysdale said the report ended Davison’s work but only started the council’s. “We absolutely can change what we do differently in future and how this organisation operates,” he said.
Grenfell also acknowledged the standing of the mountain itself, which the council refers to by its Māori name Mauao. “Mauao is far more than a physical place. It carries deep cultural, historical and spiritual significance,” he said, adding that looking after it required a real partnership with the local iwi who own it.
One of those processes is still open to the public, and only for a few more days. The Government Inquiry into the Fatal Landslides in Tauranga, chaired by retired Supreme Court judge Sir Mark O’Regan, is taking submissions until 5pm on Friday 4 September. It covers both fatal slips of 22 January, the one at the holiday park and the one on Welcome Bay Road in Pāpāmoa that killed two people, and it wants photographs, video, drone footage and rain gauge readings as well as written accounts. Announcing the extended deadline in August, Sir Mark said the submissions already received were “valuable in helping the Inquiry build a fuller picture of the circumstances surrounding these tragic events”.
The inquiry cannot decide anyone’s civil or criminal liability, though it can make findings of fault, and it will recommend whether agencies have the legal power they need to warn or move people when a slope is about to fail.
What do you make of the council’s response? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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