Motion to stop Reading Cinemas deal will be decided in secret
Friday, 23 February 2024
A motion to stop the controversial $32 million to fund Reading Cinemas earthquake strengthening will be discussed in secret by the Wellington City Council.
The deal has been plagued by leaks and criticism, with recent revelations that the council took the cinema bosses out for a $1400 seafood dinner and that the council is considering selling land to fund the deal.
Next Thursday’s council meeting will include a vote on whether the $32m Reading Cinemas deal should proceed at a time of financial strife for the council. Last week significant cuts were approved by councillors to fund water infrastructure, including the closure of three community facilities, the combined cost of which is lower than the deal to reopen the Courtenay Place cinema.
The public are likely to be excluded from the discussions about Reading Cinemas, which council staff have deemed commercially sensitive.
Councillor Iona Pannett, who is leading the charge to stop the Reading Cinemas deal, was disappointed to hear that her motion to halt the deal would trigger a public-excluded session.
“The core information is already out there, and we could debate it without revealing confidential information,” she said. When motions were discussed in private, it made people “start asking questions”.
In this case Pannett said there had already been so much discussion in public, including the Code of Conduct investigation and Long-Term Plan documents showing $26m set aside for the purchase, that it would be better to get councillors’ views about the deal into the open.
She would vote against the deal being discussed in private and would see if she could get the support of other councillors to discuss the deal in public.
Ben McNulty was still tossing up his vote, he wrote on Twitter. He had asked for the information to be released publicly, but staff were unable to publish it due to commercial sensitivity and an agreement with Reading.
“This leaves me in a rather impossible position where I feel unable to exercise good governance given the significance of the decision.”
The half of the deal that had not been made public covered most of the benefits to the council, McNulty wrote, and he believed there were “real and genuine merits to this deal proceeding”.
“Should it fail, there is a good chance that the site will sit vacant [and] decaying until 2035.”
The leaks of information about the deal include the proposed purchase price of $32m and some of the deal’s terms.
None of the information was supposed to be made public from the council’s point of view. The council has yet to hold an official meeting about the Reading Cinemas deal in public.
Earlier this week council chief financial officer Andrea Reeves would not comment on the possible funding arrangements for the deal, saying it was a matter of commercial negotiations which remained public excluded.
The closure of Reading Cinemas was another result of earthquake-prone regulations – the prominent complex was closed after an engineering assessment in 2019.
The deal for the council to reactivate the complex by purchasing the land and offsetting the American owners’ earthquake-strengthening costs was revealed last year.