Councillor stopped from leaving meeting early, but why?
“Part of the job of the deputy is to marshal the troops and he sat back down and stayed for the rest of the meeting.”
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Invercargill’s deputy mayor says his move to stop Cr Allan Arnold from leaving a meeting early this week wasn’t about ensuring Arnold stayed to vote the way he wanted.
The Invercargill City Council was divided during a discussion around a Bluff Wastewater Consent matter on Tuesday.
Deputy mayor Campbell, along with Mayor Nobby Clark, and infrastructure committee chair Grant Dermody, were keen on the status quo - discharge to Foveaux Strait through existing 50m long outfall - remaining as an option.
The vote was always expected to be tight.
Late in the discussion Cr Arnold gathered his belongings and appeared to be leaving the meeting early.
Campbell quickly stood from his seat and met Arnold on his way out.
They had a discussion, while the matter was still playing out, before Arnold then returned to his seat at the council table.
Soon after Campbell spoke at the meeting, saying the council was getting ahead of itself with the debate and urged that the matter be moved.
Council’s governance manager Michael Morris asked Campbell if he was proposing a “closure motion”. Campbell said he was.
Mayor Clark then said there would be no further debate, and the matter would be put to a vote.
Cr Lesley Soper and mana whenua representative Pania Coote objected saying they still wished to speak on the matter.
Clark initially stood firm on a vote being held then, before Cr Ian Pottinger raised a point of order in relation to Campbell’s earlier discussion with Cr Arnold.
“What was that about? Was that about that you have to leave?” Pottinger said before Mayor Clark shut him down.
“My inference was that we are forcing a vote because some person has to leave very shortly,” Pottinger said.
It’s understood some councillors felt Campbell had stopped Arnold from leaving to ensure he was there to vote the way he wanted Arnold to.
It ended up a 7-6 vote in favour of the status quo remaining as an option in the Bluff wasterwater consent process.
Mayor Clark, Campbell, Arnold, Dermody, Trish Boyle, Peter Kett, and Barry Stewart were the seven who voted in favour.
Campbell told The Tribune that he understood why some might have come to the conclusion that he had stopped Arnold from leaving to ensure his vote went a particular way. However, Campbell added that he had no idea how Arnold was going to vote.
“I just said to him you are probably going to get to vote on this pretty soon, you better stay.
“Part of the job of the deputy is to marshal the troops and he sat back down and stayed for the rest of the meeting.”
If it had been suggested at the meeting that Campbell had stopped Arnold to ensure he voted the way he wanted: “I would have just said; ‘So what? What difference does it make?’,” Campbell said.
“But that wasn’t the reason I stood up to grab him. I just thought he was going to leave at an inappropriate time when we were going to come up to a vote.”
Cr Soper - who previously was a Labour MP - later told The Tribune that “closure motions” were common in parliament but she could think of only one other time that it had been used during her time as a councillor.
“You can’t take a closure motion when you’ve got other people who have indicated they want to speak. At roughly the same time one councillor did get up as though he was going to leave the meeting, but eventually he didn’t.
“My objection to the closure motion was because there were other councillors who wanted to speak.”
After a short discussion with governance manager Michael Morris Clark did agree to let Soper and Coote speak before putting it to the vote.
Tom Campbell gets slimier by the day.
Interesting that the “ticket group” once again all voted the same way but hey we can take their word for it yeah?