WELLINGTON City Council is so dysfunctional it could be dissolved and run by a commissioner, says councillor Helen Ritchie.

Ritchie is one of a number of councillors who feel themselves to be under attack from Mayor Kerry Prendergast following the local body elections. Without the support of the team that backed her during the last term Prendergast’s leadership is breaking down, Ritchie says.

"Unless there is some fast and dramatic improvement, Wellington City Council is at breaking point because of the leadership vacuum," she says.

"I’m worried that it could propel the council into dissolution and result in a commissioner being appointed to run an interim council."

Last week, similar concerns were raised by councillor Jack Ruben He told Capital Times a rise in personality politics and intimidation by the Mayor and her supporters, Deputy Mayor Alick Shaw and Strategy and Policy Committee chair Robert Armstrong, was
leading to breakdown around to
council table.

A third councillor, Rob Goulden, has begun High Court action against the council for what he believes was an unlawful censure designed to intimidate him.

Prendergast says the claims are nonsense and that most councillors are working constructively.

"The council is working very well. It’s not a split council. Most decisions are on a large majority," Prendergast says.

"The leadership is relatively easy with the support of the
majority."

She says Goulden and Ritchie are intent on disrupting council proceedings.

"Councillors have complained to me, and council officers have as well. While councillors cause disruption, there is the potential we are not concentrating on the job we are here to do."

Deputy Mayor Alick Shaw, who has raised official complaints about Goulden, says bad behaviour at meetings has become "an Olympic sport".

"The behaviour of two councillors [Goulden and Ritchie], at least in meetings, is beyond anything I’ve seen before," Shaw says.

"It’s a hell of a lot more than tempers being frayed."

The reduction in the number of councillors from 20 to 15 (including the mayor) at the last election means disruption has a greater effect than in the previous term, he says.

"We have a smaller council and the effect of a disaffected group is more significant because they are not diluted.

"Although in political terms the council is finely balanced, they can’t get their way by persuading other councillors. They seek to disrupt it in a way that damage is absolutely inevitable."

Ritchie, who has been on and off council since 1977, points to the V8 Supercar race "fiasco" as evidence that it is the leadership, not individual councillors, causing disruption.

"Rushed, undemocratic announcements were frequently being made without going through the proper processes while councillors and staff were diverted by this issue for months. It has been a costly fiasco."

Ritchie says the allegation that Ruben had a closed mind on the V8 Supercar race, which led to the withdrawal of Ruben from the vote on the issue, is typical of the intimidation councillors are subjected to.

"I have been ruthlessly targeted with attempts to silence me. These included being threatened with arrest for ‘trespass in the council chamber’ where I was legitimately doing my work as an elected councillor," Ritchie says.

"I have been ordered to leave a council meeting and not to vote because I apparently had a ‘closed mind’. Ironically, the debate was about freedom of speech. I’m not surprised that councillor Goulden is taking council to the High Court on a similar matter. The recent action to try and silence councillor Ruben is also unsurprising."