Buller Mayor Jamie Cleine Photo: RNZ / Nate Mckinnon
By Lee Scanlon of The Westport News
Buller Mayor Jamie Cleine says he is "flying blind" over allegations about financial mismanagement relating to the Buller District Council's Project Management Office (PMO).
"I'm relying on a protected disclosure, which I have not seen, and a letter from community members to the Auditor-General, which I have not seen," Cleine said on Friday.
"I'm encouraging the authorities who do have those to do whatever they need to do to resolve the matter. And I fully support that."
Council's new chief executive Steve Gibling on Thursday announced the council would commission a forensic audit following "serious allegations of mismanagement of funds" relating to the PMO.
Cleine said he had implored councillors to share any information they had.
He said the response from councillors had been, "We have nothing that not's already in the media".
Media reports had been "kind of light on detail", Cleine said.
Gibling on Thursday released two reports on the PMO, an 'Infrastructure Health Check Update' and a 'PMO Review'. Both reports were completed by consultant Morrison Low and Associates (ML). They basically gave the PMO a clean bill of health.
But Gibling said ML was not asked to look deeply into financial mismanagement allegations.
Cleine told The Westport News in June that the council had commissioned a review of the PMO after the National Emergency Management Agency jibbed at paying some bills.
Asked today why he had not mentioned ML was also doing a 'health check' on the PMO, Cleine said he hadn't been aware of it and had not been involved in the staff decision to commission either report.
Cleine said the ML reports were not a waste of ratepayer money because they gave council valuable information about PMO processes and recommended improvements.
The Westport News has previously reported the review would cost about $40,000. The Westport News has asked the council for the final costs of the review and health check.
Cleine said he had never seen a report council staff commissioned from Team Projects Advisory (TP) in 2021, nine months after the PMO was set up, which found dozens of flaws.
The Westport News obtained a leaked copy of the report last week after the council refused a request under the Local government Official Information and Meetings Act to release it.
Asked why council staff had not previously provided it to elected members, Cleine said he didn't know.
"But I think we've got a lot of hindsight accountability... At the time it was sorting out management issues. No one was talking about potential financial discrepancies or anything."
The Westport News revealed this week that TP's report found "significant risks in many areas" including financial controls, health and safety, procurement, project management and monitoring, and quality assurance.
Westport. Photo: Greymouth Star / Brendon McMahon
TP went on to become a key PMO consultant. It has since received about $1.2 million for its PMO work.
All up, consultants to the PMO have cost more than $6m since the council established the office in January 2021 to handle big projects.
Cleine said ML had interviewed him for its reports and he'd passed on all the information he had.
ML's list of interviewees don't include council's infrastructure manager Mike Duff, who was instrumental in setting up the PMO. The list wrongly describes one staff member, who works in technical support, as a "roading engineer".
Asked yesterday why Duff had not been interviewed, Gibling said Duff was on secondment to the Three Waters Transition Unit when ML conducted its interviews.
The terms of reference for the planned forensic audit have been developed by a sub-committee comprising Cleine, the independent chair of the council's Risk and Audit Committee, Sharon Roche, Cr Colin Reidy and himself.
Asked whether he and Roche should have declared a conflict of interest, Cleine said no.
He said the terms of reference had been formulated by council's auditor Ernst & Young. "We sat and reviewed them as a panel… in fact we expanded it from what they originally proposed."
He acknowledged the audit would cost ratepayers a substantial sum. Gibling has guesstimated close to six figures.
- This article was originally published by The Westport News