He’s certainly going to try hard to be. Last Sunday we had breakfast with Gwynn at the Front Room on Waikanae Beach to get a handle on his ambitions, ability to relate to people and grasp of Kapiti issues — he impresses on all counts.
The immediate thing you notice is that he’s significantly younger than the incumbent, and with a wife and two children aged 2 and 6 months, he comes into the young familyman category. Gwynn lives in Paraparaumu Beach. He is originally from Wellington, but his wife has a strong Kapiti Coast lineage.
He is a member of the Kapiti Economic Development Association and this is something he’s clearly enthusiastic about. He doesn’t want Kapiti to simply be a commuter suburban area of Wellington, which it could well become once the Transmission Gully freeway is opened in late 2020 — or a coffee stop for travelers as KCDC Chief Executive Wayne Maxwell sees it — jobs need to be created locally for people. In the last few years jobs have come mostly from road and house construction which won’t last.
Presently he is a marketing /PR guy for Beef + Lamb New Zealand and for 3 years he was a media consultant for Prime Ministers John Key and Bill English. That may be (and probably is) a minus for those who support other political parties, but he makes clear that he is very much an independent and national level politics don’t apply much in Kapiti anyway. Already, on the Social Housing issue he’s made clear that he supports council provided accommodation for those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
He’s aware that the incumbent elected mayor always has the inside running in campaigns simply because of all the publicity he/she gets as the mayor, and in Guru’s case the two local freebies are more than friendly towards the council, undoubtedly because of the $200,000 a year in advertising they get from it — they can’t bite the hand that feeds them. Still, on the the other hand, the council is much hated by ratepayers and the mood to “throw out the present lot” is strong.
The unilateral, top down nature of the council’s behaviour and culture is something he wants to change drastically.
It might be asked if being the mayor of Kapiti is a job anyone would really want, following a decade of bad council decisions and dreadful management, with maxed-out credit lines and overburdened ratepayers the result: funding for any new initiatives is more than tight. He thinks that the central government is where the next council will have to go.
Our meeting was an introduction: later in the year we will meet up with Gywnn again to cover specifics of his intentions as mayor.
Isn’t Mr Compton the chap who re-run an absurd article from Fairfax, smearing David Scott and stating that he should be purged from Council? If so, then it surely does not say much for Mr Compton’s independence of mind and spirit, nor his ability to form judgements on important matters on a basis of empiricism and detachment. At the minimum, one might hope that at least he could restrain himself until knowing about a subject before pontificating.
WW quotes Mr Compton as believing that, ‘The unilateral, top down nature of the council’s behaviour and culture is something he wants to change drastically’. We’ve heard it before. His views on the above hardly indicate a good start. It would be nice to be wrong.
We’re not aware of that and he knows our views on the David Scott affair. Yes, promises are cheap and we’ve seen U-turns on them from the last 3 Mayors including Guru: it’s an action plan and the commitment to seeing it through that matters
Words are cheap; specific actions in specific time rather than vague promises are what we need from any of the potential candidates.
Making oneself available at Council sounds like an ex Mayor Church promise that really is not sustainable given the load of meetings/commitments etc.that the Mayor has to deal with, not to mention getting past his personal assistant.
Forming citizen advisory groups related to specific issues might be a good start and some specifics around how to actually achieve community consultation, indeed any form of consultation (past the first rung of consultation) that actually takes account of input.
Actually listening to ratepayers would be a useful first step and paying them some attention to what they have to say and indeed acting on that for a change.
Recall how few of the
Changing the whole way Council meetings are organised would also help, so that they are more interactive.
Changing the culture of staff and councillors as well as actually running Council in a business like manner would also be a good starting point.
As to social housing, the issue is how to maintain, upgrade/replacing and service social housing while charging affordable rents.
Let’s hear what has actually happened to date under the Mayors current term.