With only one man of the WDC’s executive team still surfing it’s a wipe out for all other members of the old team. This week, CEO Gavin Ion announced that a Ms Sue Duignan would be joining the council in April as general manager customer support with a Mr Tim Harty taking up the position of general manager service delivery the same month. This means that none of the current executive team have secured either of the new positions. Apart from the one position that was not restructured this means that the rest of the executives will all either be leaving the council as retirees or looking elsewhere for employment.
Mr Ion said, “The new general manager positions will ensure the executive team has a stronger focus on customer support and service delivery which better reflects the needs of our business”.
Ms Duigan has been a consultant for the last two years and prior to that worked at Hamilton City Council in human resources, customer service and organisational performance. Mr Harty currently works at Hamilton City Council as the City Waters Manager. He came to public attention in August 2012 when a process to reduce wages at the Hamilton water plant saw staff leave and Mr Harty having to fly in foreign workers at a great cost to Hamilton ratepayers just to keep the water plant operational.
Raglan Community Board Chair, Rodger Gallagher commented, “The previous executives served Raglan well. I’m concerned that Raglan has lost our nominated support executive and the council CEO still can’t tell us where that high level support will come from in the new structure. It really is time to unchain Raglan from Ngaruawahia and this increasingly irrelevant council organisation.”
Completely agree even more need for decisions to be made locally. But it’ll have to be a political campaign and for that we need a team of new councillors ready to be nominated by July in conjunction with the other community boards. Otherwise, we’ll still have decisions like the $15,000 wasted on new picnic tables (when the old ones were in better state than many seats) and with the work done when they’re still needed, instead of at the end of the season.
“executive team has a stronger focus on customer support and service delivery which better reflects the needs of our business”. If the CEO is rating the performance of departing executives from HCC as the best then we are in for a seismic performance!
It seems Sue Duignan completed a Masters of Management Studies in 2011 and left HCC in August 2011 “to explore new opportunities” [from Tuesday, 26 July 2011, HCC Press Release]. Is WDC her new opportunity? Richard Bax also worked for HCC before coming to WDC in 2006.