Two Whangamatā residents have just done something most of us would not have the patience for. Ian Holyoake and Rob Boston accepted an invitation from Thames-Coromandel District Council to join its Whangamatā stormwater stakeholder process, and they stayed in it for three and a half years. They have now lodged eleven formal complaints with the Ombudsman, under CASE-027284, about how that process was run.
Let me be clear about what this is not. The complaints do not ask the Ombudsman to decide whether a wetland or a dry detention basin is the better answer at Williamson Park, or whether a pipe belongs in Hetherington Road or Port Road. They ask something simpler and, for ratepayers, more important. They are asking: Was the process itself fair, informed and accountable?
• The eleven complaints run across the whole process.
• Whether Council gave invited stakeholders the reports and data they needed to take part meaningfully.
• How official information requests were administered while that process was live.
• Whether one stakeholder had his participation restricted, and on whose authority.
• Whether a view of the man came to stand in for assessment of his evidence.
• How the workshops were conducted.
• What happened to the Kepner-Tregoe matrix used to rank 19 stormwater projects.
• The process behind flood-hazard letters sent to 3,195 property owners.
• The Williamson Park decision trail. The Hetherington and Port Road pathway.
• The Chief Executive’s handling of the internal complaint.
• And finally, whether Council can show what became of the community’s submissions at all.
Some of the detail on the record is hard to read past. By April 2024, an invited stakeholder had filed around 26 official information requests to obtain material Council already held. At the Whangamatā Community Board that month, members Neil Evans and Denis Beaver put the contradiction to a Council manager directly: How can you ask people for advice while withholding the documents they need to give it? Council’s own Master Plan records that submitted matrix scores were required to have certain criteria modified. However, the eleven staff who investigated the complaint about the stormwater process included officers from that same process.
Then there is Rob Boston’s position. At a public meeting in April 2023, with around 135 people recorded as attending, he moved seven stormwater resolutions and they carried unanimously. He carried that mandate into Council. Three and a half years on, the fair question is not whether Council had to accept all seven. It did not. The question is whether any of us can trace what happened to each one – who considered it, what was decided, on what reasoning, and what was reported back.
Readers should know that I am not a neutral observer. I attended one of the meetings this material covers, in July 2025, I objected at the time to what I saw, and I have given the complainants a written statement about it. Weigh what I say accordingly.
These should not be read as eleven grievances. They are one question asked eleven ways. If a council invites a community into a process, what is that invitation actually worth? Ratepayers funded the consultants, the staff time and the capital works. Two volunteers funded their own research, their own document recovery and their own three and a half years.
The Ombudsman will now decide what to examine, and Council will have every opportunity to answer. That is exactly as it should be. But one lesson is already available to everyone around the council table, whatever the findings turn out to be. Participation without a traceable record of what was done with it is not participation. It is decoration.
◾️Patrick Kerr is Chair of Whangamatā Business Association
