Mayor labels council CCTV project 'a disaster'

“This has been a disaster for us as a council, we’ve lost a lot of community faith around this."

Invercargill Mayor Nobby Clark has taken the lead on the council’s CCTV project labelling it a disaster.

Invercargill Mayor Nobby Clark says the council’s CCTV project has been a disaster on the back of delays and cost increases.

And as a result, Clark himself has now stepped in to take a lead role on the project.

In May 2022 police representatives fronted Invercargill city councillors asking for it to make a “bold” investment, not just to help in its quest to solve crime, but to try to help make Invercargill a safer place.

It explained that just one of the nine police-monitored city centre CCTV cameras now worked.

Earlier this year, the council committed $1.1 million to investigate and install CCTV across the city and in Bluff.

Stage one was initially expected to be completed by December, but the timeline has now been pushed back to April next year.

Stage one would include 65 cameras across sites in the Invercargill CBD.

CCTV in South City and Bluff would be considered in stage two.

The entire project is now tipped to take five years.

It has also been revealed that the overall project is likely to almost double, tipping over the $2m mark.

Clark was particularly scathing as to where the CCTV project was at when it was discussed at a finance and projects meeting on Tuesday.

“This has been a disaster for us as a council, we’ve lost a lot of community faith around this,” he said.

“I’ll have to front a meeting next week and explain to people we won’t have the cameras available in December like we gave a commitment we would have. We’ve got to have some confidence going forward.”

Clark has “exercised his powers” and ditched a community group that was attached to the project and had Crs Lesley Soper and Ria Bond part of it.

The mayor himself will now take the lead on the project, from a governance point of view.

“It’s not easy to make the following comments. I’m not comfortable with the advice I’ve got from staff on where we are at at the moment. I think the buck has been passed across to the [Project Management Office].

“I don’t know how we can be comfortable with the cost going from $800,000 not too long ago to $2.3m. How it can go from a year or two at most right across the network to be five years.

“I don’t know who to believe anymore. I’ve personally asked twice with the last three months for assurances that we would have these cameras installed in the CBD by December, because the public wants to know that at Christmas time the CBD will be safe.

“I got assurances it would be there, subject to a comment that; ‘it would be a bit of a stretch’. But now a seven-month delay and a doubling of the cost is a stretch too far for me.”

Clark said he would like a specialist from the industry to review where they are at.

Cr Ian Pottinger said he had been in discussion that day with someone from the industry who could provide advice at a cost of $5000.

Pottinger said he himself in the weekend went as far as to do his own costings for the CCTV project. He said he came up with a cost of $870,000, well below what the council staff had indicated in their reporting.

“The pricing does not add up… Sorry, I just can’t sit here and accept the way it’s been done,” Pottinger said.

Although the council’s programme director Lee Butcher said Pottinger’s costings were wrong and his assumptions were why the project was costed wrong in the first place.

“This is where this went wrong. This is where Safer Cities got it a little bit wrong and unfortunately, Cr Pottinger has got it a little bit wrong,” Butcher said.

“You have to connect it all up and once you look to view it properly and how you are going to view it, it’s a lot more than that.”

Cr Lesley Soper wasn’t comfortable with Pottinger bringing “back of the envelope” calculations to the council meeting.

“This is the danger of councillors in a governance role putting themselves in the management space.

“None of us as governors should be coming to the table with back-of-the-envelope calculations.”

Soper did not believe it needed to bring in someone to carry out a peer review. She said the council’s project management office had already dug into it and Soper felt they should get on with stage one.

Finance and projects committee chair Grant Dermody backed Clark and Pottinger’s call to have someone come in and take a look at where the project was at.

“We need reassured, around cost particularly. If we can get it done quicker at a cheaper cost, we need to look at that.

“We’ve spent eight months thinking everything is on track when it isn’t,” Dermody said.

The council decided to engage with the unnamed South Island expert suggested by Pottinger.