Standard gets it wrong again

The elected members of Palmerston North City Council have only one employee - the Chief Executive Officer. In the latter stages of Jill White’s term as Mayor, Mr Paul Wylie was appointed to this position. As CEO, he is responsible for employing staff, so while the elected council has one employee, the CEO has hundreds. It is a testament to Paul Wylie that he has taken the organisation through a period of great change while ensuring that PNCC has extremely capable staff and a management team that is arguably the best in the country. Most of this team have been with the council for many years. They do an excellent job for the city and it is largely due to their expert advice to council that we have a city that is prospering and growing.

The role of a CEO in local government is a very demanding one. Councils work in a legislative framework and elected members, some of whom may have limited or no business experience, are the decision-makers within a billion plus dollar “business”. Few outside of local government find themselves working with sixteen employers. Paul Wylie has sixteen “bosses”.

A council CEO is charged with ensuring that council decisions are carried out. We have a ten-year plan and budgets that are available for everyone to see. Certain tasks are delegated by council to the CEO but that spending has to be approved by council (and the amount budgeted for delegations has remained unchanged for almost 12 years). So, when “council” spends money it is the direct result of decisions made by the elected members.

Former US President, Harry S. Truman had a sign on his desk that read, “the buck stops here”.

The Manawatu Standard editor wrote an editorial on 20th February called, “City Heart or Wylie’s Folly” in which he makes a number of misleading claims. I have commented previously about the misinformation being published in our local newspaper so I will not dissect the inaccuracies of the editorial here (the Press Council would probably argue that an editorial is an opinion piece anyway and does not need to be factual or accurate). However, the editorial concludes with this:

It could be argued that councillors are ultimately responsible for such decisions, and they are. However, Mr Wylie has been driving The Square redevelopment and if he wishes to claim credit for the obvious improvements in the area as a result of the makeover, he must also take responsibility for the embarrassingly large amount of money it has cost us.

Umm… sorry Mr Editor, there is no argument about it - councillors & the Mayor are not just “ultimately” responsible, we are entirely responsible! To paraphrase President Truman (who made some very astute comments about leadership), “elected members have to make the decisions. They cannot pass the buck to anybody. No-one else can do the deciding for them. It’s their job.”