Jo Miller, the council chief executive who's making waves in Lower Hutt
Wednesday, 22 September 2021
Just before Jo Miller arrived in Lower Hutt in July of 2019, the self-styled “rebel daughter of Liverpool” said she would take her plain-speaking style to her new job as chief executive at the Hutt City Council.
“It doesn’t work for me to keep my trap shut about things that are inherently wrong because I don’t believe that silence [encourages] people to buy in to what you’re trying to achieve,” Miller, the outgoing chief executive of the Doncaster Metropolitan Borough Council, told the UK’s Local Government Chronicle.
“At the same time, not all diplomacy is conducted with the best megaphone. There are lots of sotto voce conversations on things. I may have been an inconvenient truth for some people sometimes, but I don’t apologise for it,” she said.
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Miller was a well-known figure in the local government sector in the UK. She had held positions at councils in Liverpool, Wirral, Knowsley and Bradford, before becoming deputy chief executive of the Local Government Association, according to the Chronicle.
She joined the Doncaster council in 2010 after a decade of scandal for the South Yorkshire local authority, and managed to right the ship during seven years as chief executive of the council, which governed an area that more than 300,000 people called home.
Hutt City Council heralded her appointment, with the acting mayor, David Bassett, saying she was the “stand out” candidate from a very strong group. “We believe she has the vision and the drive to step into this critical leadership role and take our city forward,” he said.
Fast forward two years. Miller – who earns more than $380,000 a year, more than twice as much as the mayor – has made good on her pledge to speak out. But others on the council have not always enjoyed the same freedom.
She has threatened to sue three councillors – including Bassett, who resigned in June – for defamation, then took a personal grievance claim against the council, saying it had not create a safe working environment for her.
She has taken to Twitter to sharply criticise Mark Crofskey, who stood unsuccessfully for National in Remutaka in 2020, and has mocked him as the “Wadestown Worrier,” or “WW” for short. She accused him of politically motivated attacks against the council because it is led by a Labour-affiliated mayor, Campbell Barry.
Miller has declined requests for an interview, and Crofskey declined to comment.
Miller also took the unusual step of appearing to support one councillor, Shazly Rasheed, saying she had the “utmost respect” for Rasheed “whose integrity I admire” as a “strong” woman working for the city.
Barry said the council has no relevant policies policing senior managers’ use of social media. “The chief executive’s personal Twitter account is a matter for her,” he said in a statement.
In the two years since Miller flew in from Doncaster, the council has undergone significant change.
The senior management team put in place by the previous chief executive, Tony Stallinger, has been dismantled. There is an increased focus on investing in infrastructure and a new rubbish and recycling system. After more than two decades of talk, there has also finally been significant progress on RiverLink, a project that will transform the central city.
Politically, Barry has a solid core of councillors who support him and clearly has a good relationship with Miller.
One person who has observed Miller closely is Dr Andy Asquith, a local government expert who, like Miller, is from the north of England. He saw Miller in action in local government there.
Asquith rated Miller highly and said Hutt City was lucky to have such a high calibre leader. He credited her with having a good understanding of the role of a chief executive, with the vision to make a real difference in the community she worked in.
Doncaster was a “donkey case” when Miller took over, he said, and she earned her reputation in England by working closely with a Labour mayor and regenerating the city.
In New Zealand, councillors often do not understand that their role is solely governance and not operational, Asquith said.
A candidate for the 2019 Palmerston North council who called himself “Independent Labour”, Asquith said that when the relationship between a chief executive and councillors broke down, it tended to be because councillors interfered in operational matters.
There is a case to argue that this is exactly what happened in Hutt City.
Much of the disharmony that exists today revolves around Cr Chris Milne. A former ACT staffer, Milne made little effort to hide his opposition to Campbell Barry, who when elected in 2019, was the youngest mayor in New Zealand. Milne was censured by the full council after an independent investigator concluded he had breached the code of conduct on two occasions.
Bassett and fellow councillor Leigh Sutton defended Milne, setting in train a dispute that led to Miller threatening legal action against the three representatives.
It is not the first time since arriving in Lower Hutt that Miller has threatened legal action.
After Stallinger, her predecessor, went on a community radio station and gave a bland interview about council business, Miller sent him a cease and desist letter.
“I take this matter very seriously, I expect an assurance that you cease and desist from making further statements about me,” Miller wrote to Stallinger. “Please treat this email as notice that I reserve my rights to address your unwanted and defamatory attack upon me which is damaging to the well-founded reputation, I have established over many years.”
Stallinger was surprised. He spent 12 years at the helm of the council and said he never threatened anybody with defamation during that time.
Stallinger said that in the radio interview, he had simply responded to criticism of his financial management.
She threatened legal action against Stuff and council critic Max Shierlaw, who put documents about the council restructuring on Facebook.
Although, Miller clearly dislikes the bad publicity generated by the issues around Cr Milne, she can make a strong case to say she is doing a good job.
Earlier this month, she emailed staff about her new performance targets set by the council. “At that same meeting council resolved unanimously to acknowledge my performance over the last year, noting I had demonstrated outstanding added value,” she said.
After the Dominion Post reported on the defamation threats made to councillors, she told staff she had suffered “sustained personal attacks on her integrity” which had sparked the legal action.
“These matters have since been resolved and I do not intend to take any further action,” she wrote. “The council has an ambitious agenda for the city and our people, and its important that I get on with my work in implementing the council’s priorities including housing, transport and climate change.”