Herald Maths

Bernard Orsman at reports:

 Seven chief executives and their staffs plus 49 directors are responsible for 75 per cent of the Super City's services.

Auckland ratepayers are spending $13.1 million a year to pay for seven boards of directors, seven chief executives and seven executive teams run much of the Super City.

The seven council-controlled organisations (CCOs) run about 75 per cent of Super City services at arm's length from the democratically elected .

don't know about you, but $13.1 million for governors, CEOs and executive teams seems pretty reasonable to me. The Herald doesn't state how many staff are on the combined executive teams, but an average of under $2 million per CCO for a Board, a CEO and a senior executive team does not seem unreasonable. The combined Auckland Council spends $2 billion a year.

The chief executive salaries range from $330,000 for the head of Auckland , Events and Economic Development, Brett O'Riley, and Auckland Council Investments' Gary Swift, to about $710,000 for Watercare boss .

The Herald estimates that Mr Ford's salary is the equivalent cost of Aucklanders taking about 9.5 million showers.

This is the part I really wanted to blog on. I'm sorry, but what the fuck? How is this a useful or relevant stat? Tell me what his salary is as a percentage of Watercare revenue. Is the Herald now going to write about the salaries of Telecom CEO in terms of the number of of the same cost? Or the salaries of a newspaper editor in terms of the number of ads served?

If the comparison had been to the number of days water to a household, I'd find that semi-useful. But unless you know how much of your daily water use tends to be a shower, then the comparison is useless. The suspicion is it is used to just make the salary sound really bad.

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