Lessons learned after Leith Place dunny debacle

Friday, 7 March 2025

South Waikato District Council chief executive Susan Law says blaming staff for Leith Place’s disastrous dunnies does nothing for team morale, but processes have been put in place to prevent it happening again.

Law also told the Waikato Times that constant maintenance and repair of the broken bogs had cost the council more than $100,000 a year since they were opened in December 2019.

On Tuesday, the Waikato Times reported on a South Waikato District Council decision to spend $600,000 replacing faulty toilets installed during its $4m Leith Place redevelopment, which opened to the public in December 2019.

Despite being only five years old, Tokoroa’s architecturally-designed, award-winning, million-dollar toilets will be bowled because they are “not fit for purpose”, and replaced in April.

In a follow-up article, current and former councillors blamed staff for a lack of information, and said the toilets were “broken from day one”, being too small and cramped, originally installed without any ventilation, and were fitted with pipes too small for the job.

Former mayor Jenny Shattock, who led the project, previously told the Waikato Times it was not her fault as staff told her all the way through that everything was fine.

“Obviously I wasn't here at the time, but it was a council decision, and there are things that we should have and could have done better all round,” Law said.

“However, the big issue now is we're fixing it. We've admitted we've got it wrong, and we're fixing it.

“Over the next 24 months there's huge changes coming for local government, and I'd like to think that the staff will not be put off for fear that if it goes wrong they get the blame.”

Law said she suspected the Leith Place redevelopment was “inadequately scoped”.

“And to some extent that happens because you don't know what's under the ground until you get under the ground.

“That's why we build a reasonably large contingency into our projects now.

“Unfortunately that didn't happen for Leith Place.”

While Law could not 100% guarantee a similar situation would not occur in future, she said it would be a lot harder for potential problems to be missed.

“There are things that we as an organisation have changed because we've learned from that project in terms of scoping and estimating costs that we do not do any more.

“We've got a whole new project management office now … with people who keep oversight of all of the capital projects we are doing.

“We report monthly to council on what is happening with each project and where it is in the whole scheme of things.

“So if anything is looking like approaching going over budget or beyond scope, we flag that early and we give the council an opportunity to determine what they want to do about it.”

She said it was the staff’s job to act on council’s decisions and the council’s job to have oversight and ask the right questions of staff.

“At least they will have advance warning of when things are going off track for whatever reason.”

Law said she believed the Leith Place project “went off track fairly quickly” and the toilets were costing the council around $100,000 a year to clean and maintain.

“It just got to the point that this was not supportable from an operational point of view … the cost of fixing what's there would have been astronomical.

“It's actually cheaper for us to put in new toilets.”

She said spending over a million dollars digging up Leith Place to replace pipework would not have gone down well with ratepayers, along with the disruption it would cause to local businesses.