Accountability is good

The Herald reports:

Tauranga City Council chief executive Marty Grenfell has resigned after councillors held an emergency closed-door meeting this afternoon over the Davison report.

The council-commissioned review into the fatal Mount Maunganui landslide, conducted by retired High Court judge Paul Davison, KC, revealed a litany of council failures leading up to the “preventable” disaster.

A council statement said Grenfell resigned today and would finish on October 2. It did not say whether his departure was related to the review.

Grenfell had faced public calls to resign following the review’s publication last month.

This is the right outcome. It’s not that Grenfell was personally responsible. In fact he didn’t even know about the risks. But he has been the CE for the last eight years, during which time his staff were aware that there was serious risks, including death, from the location of the camping ground, and those risks were never considered by the Council, and entered on the Council’s risk register so they could be mitigated. It was a system failure, and the CE is responsible for ensuring good systems.