See the original letter and comments from our editorial group here

To answer the question in the last paragraph, the mayor and councillors collectively employ Mr Maxwell and they are the ones who should exercise their responsibility in this regard. If they don’t, then the voters can in turn express attitudes about them through the ballot box next year.

From what we know, apart from the present mayor, the only diehard supporters Mr Maxwell has around the council table are Crs Holborow and Buswell (and in 2019 we said that Kapiti would be better off without those two). There are 5 councillors who have considerable misgivings about Mr Maxwell and 3 who have mild misgivings. It would be great to be a ‘fly on the wall’ at the next CEO Performance Review meeting.