Leaked memo highlighted Wellington Water issues in 2022
Saturday, 8 March 2025
A leaked confidential memo saw many of the current issues with Wellington Water raised almost three years ago.
“We haven’t had the right people on the board that knew this is an over-inflated bill and we need to do something about it,” former Wellington City councillor Sean Rush, who wrote the six-page memo in 2022, said this week. He saw the issue as serious enough to raise concerns while he was on leave for cancer treatment.
The Post has obtained the document ‒ marked confidential ‒ he sent to Doug Martin, who was at the time leading a inquiry into a Wellington Water fluoride blunder.
Two reports came out this week showing Wellington Water was over-paying contractors, was open to fraud and had less-than-ideal contracting processes. Wellington Water Committee chairperson Campbell Barry said the ratepayer-funded utility was prioritising contractors over ratepayers.
Rush’s memo highlighted a “dearth of genuine industry experience” on the Wellington Water board and said the Wellington Water Committee was a “political animal, putting politics ahead of good governance”. Wellington Water has a committee, led by Barry ‒ Hutt City mayor ‒ which gives direction to the board, chaired by Nick Leggett.
Rush said Wellington Water lacked enough engineers in senior leadership, data management was “poor” and nobody on the board could challenge the views of executives.
“The contracting arrangements are fine and the execution of large scale projects, by major contractors, has been exemplary,” he said.
Rush was previously on the Maui Pipeline Steering Committee, where he would get monthly briefings from the technical contractor. Wellington Water reporting did not appear to follow a set formula.
He raised concerns about Wellington Water’s lack of an asset management system and its lacking data management. When a Willis St wastewater pipe burst in 2019, spilling sewage into the harbour, it was discovered that an earlier report saying it was in need of urgent attention had been lost.
“I promptly asked our officers for a list of the city’s 10 most critical assets and when they were last inspected. They couldn’t tell me.”
When the Wellington Water committee needed new members, a shortlist of Leggett, who a former Porirua mayor, and former Wellington City Council chief of staff Kaine Thompson, was put forward. Texts seen by The Post show Rush was backed in opposing the appointments by then-mayor Andy Foster, then-deputy mayor Sarah Free and councillor Iona Pannett, who shared the concerns about lack of water infrastructure industry experience.
Rush said he was “surprised” both had political backgrounds “with no practical water industry or infrastructure asset management experience”.
Martin, in his fluoride findings, recommended ensuring the board “has the right collective experience and knowledge to govern effectively” and that it improved asset management.
Dame Kerry Prendergast, the former Wellington mayor now heading the advisory oversight group reforming the region’s water, told Parliament’s Finance and Expenditure Committee on Wednesday the Wellington Water structure meant it was “maybe set up to fail”. She called for a governing body of independent professionals, such as engineers.
Wellington Water acting chief operations office Charles Barker said it would be inappropriate to comment on Rush’s memo.
As a result of the fluoride inquiry there was work to ensure the board had the experience and knowledge to govern effectively, he said.
Wellington City environment and infrastructure committee chairperson Tim Brown, whose background is in infrastructure, backed Rush.
He, mayor Tory Whanau, and Rush had all discovered “next to no ability to change anything” while on the Regional Water Committee. Nothing happened after they tabled a late-2023 FieldForce4 report, which found many serious issues at Wellington Water.
New Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dougherty in November outlined a raft of issues with the entity he had just taken over, including the lack of an asset management system.