Mayoral candidate keen for big changes

Otago Daily Times

31-07-2025

Wide-ranging changes — from slashing council salaries to creating a mayoral forum of "intelligent people" — are proposed by the man challenging to be mayor in Central Otago.
Roxburgh resident Mark Quinn, who is travelling New Zealand in his role as the founder of Challenging Councils New Zealand (a grassroots movement focused on holding local councils accountable), has joined the mayoral contest and wants to take the region back to the future by taking councils back to borough councils.
Mr Quinn said he would be back at his home in Roxburgh early next month to campaign for the mayoralty and a council seat in the Teviot Valley ward.
In 2016 he bought land for an almond orchard and had been slowly developing that, although for the past three years he had been travelling New Zealand promoting the Challenging Councils message, he said.
He is standing as he is concerned his children and more particularly, his grandchildren, will never have the chance to own a house.
"I know a lot and I just think that we need to stand up and do what granddad did for us.
"We need to protect our grandchildren and I don't see the current system protecting my grandchildren in any way, shape or form."
His two biggest bugbears were the Central Otago District Council, which was absorbing the rates take in-house through wages and expenses, and Local Government New Zealand (LGNZ).
"The council was designed by great-granddad and granddad and dad and they set up a core structure for us to live under in a healthy way, and the people all ran the council and did the work and everything else.
"Now we're finding that these people no longer have a job and they're bringing contractors in from outside and their charges are excessive."
Nine councils in New Zealand, including Auckland and Christchurch, had already left LGNZ, and that should be a trend, Mr Quinn said.
"I don't see that local government, which is designed by Parliament, is actually here for the people."
He said there was nothing wrong with the borough council system and "we were a bit happy-go-lucky" with the 1989 reform of local government that reduced councils from 120 to 78 around the country.
Mr Quinn said New Zealanders were naive and complacent at that time and as a result, central government has over time "slowly chipped away at things", first with the introduction of the LGA (Local Government Act) in 2002, then the LGFA (Local Government Borrowing Act) in 2011. Since then, councils have been able to borrow freely, and now "we're at a tipping point," Mr Quinn said.
He said councils needed to return to core responsibilities and step back from funding areas never intended for local or central government.
Mr Quinn said he was not aware of anyone dying from drinking water, apart from through human error like not cleaning out filters, as in Hawke's Bay and Tauranga, but sewers were in dire straits and subdivisions were being built without the comparable increase in sewer capacity.
Mr Quinn was planning to create a "brains trust" around this if he became mayor.
He had 40 years in business behind him, having designed the first Countdown and Pak'nSave supermarkets, as well as being Ron Brierley's "hatchet man" in the 1980s.
"Being a mayor is one thing, but sitting down with some intelligent people outside of the council and having a cross-section look at it is imperative."
That group would analyse and prioritise things, take them back to the public, then to the council and tell them what they were going to do, Mr Quinn said.
The rest of the elected councillors would not fit that bill, he said.
"There must be some [intelligent people] . . . I just don't know who they are yet. There are others coming on board that have got that intelligence, so we need to form a good crew.
"I'm certainly not going to write anyone off until I sit in front of them. But the question is, what on earth have they achieved in the last 20 years other than debt and natural resources not being updated?"
Mr Quinn said the council was a service centre not a corporate entity, yet it paid corporate wages.
He stated that lowering wages would not be an impediment to attracting staff, and that those who had wages cut would not be a loss if they left, as that would demonstrate they were there for the wages and not to serve the people.