Dunedin water quality - deferred spending has shocking cost now

Retired engineer Murray Petrie knows a thing or 2. 

This article appeared before the last local body elections. One way and another, largely by dumping experienced permanent employees as a cost-saving measure then hiring consultants who naturally lack knowledge of what happened in the past the city developed institutional amnesia. 

Every now and then an "old timer" pops up with reminders. 
 

*What worked, what didn't, 

any perverse incentives that worked against best decisions, 

any unintended consequences.

*Otago Daily Times

Monday, 9 September 2019

Decisions in the pipeline

By Bruce Munro

 

A quarter of a century ago, Dunedin City Council elected members were told they should put aside $3million a year to renew the city's ageing water pipes. There was no consistent follow-through. It is now estimated that by 2029 it will cost ratepayers $35million a year to get the job done.
Farsighted. Adjective. Having or showing imagination or foresight. Prudent, discerning, judicious, canny.
In 1995, Murray Petrie was an engineer working in the DCC water department. The city's drinking water was graded "E".
"It was pretty bad," says Petrie, who has recently retired after a 42-year engineering career, including three decades at the city council.
"It was highly coloured water from up at Deep Stream. It was only chlorinated. It smelt a lot and tasted terrible."
Ironically, captains docking passenger liners at Port Chalmers in those early days of the cruise ship boom were commenting on the excellent quality of the water with which they could refill tanks.
"Now if you asked the people in Port Chalmers about the quality of their water, they would have said it's terrible," Petrie recalls.

 

Retired engineer Murray Petrie is concerned about the decision-making capacity of local government elected representatives. Photo: Peter McIntosh 

 

The crucial difference was that the cruise ships were filling up from pipes direct from the city's water treatment plant; pipes laid when the container port was built 20 years earlier. The residents of the port town, however, were drinking water from much, much older pipes. "Their water was going through nearly 100-year-old pipes that hadn't been maintained, had bio-film and everything else. So, their water was disgusting."
City water engineer at the time, Nigel Harwood, conducted a strategic study of the issue. He insisted that water treatment was not the only problem; that reticulation, supply, the whole of the city's water infrastructure, needed attention. It was Harwood, Petrie says, who told councillors they needed to be spending $3million a year to sort things before they got worse.
"It was a good, farsighted decision - had it been maintained," Petrie says.
"You do look at the planning and wonder about some of the decisions.
"There have been a lot of decisions made that now will be very costly."
That is just one example, from one local government body.......


........Petrie sees some of the negative impacts that have come from mis-handled decisions around council tables.
By way of example, he returns to the issue of water infrastructure renewal. It was too easy, he says, for successive councils to defer the work in order to cut costs. The result; "Now we're landed with quite a large infrastructure replacement cost".
That seems to be putting it rather mildly.
What had been $3million a year in 1995 had, by 2012, become a projection that $26million a year would need to be spent for the decade from 2025. By 2016, the government auditor was warning the DCC's "three waters" (drinking, storm and waste water) renewal spending was $60million behind schedule. Those chickens are now coming home to roost - $37 of every $100 of Dunedin ratepayers' money goes to three-waters spending. But they also appear to be being shooed into the future. The latest forecast is that three-waters renewal expenditure will need to be $35million a year for 16 years from 2029 and then just under $30million a year for a further 20 years.

The crux of the problem, Petrie believes, is that many people become elected representatives without really knowing how to make quality, farsighted decisions about the many complex issues that come at them across the council table.

"Most of our long-term decisions are the same sort of thinking as `What will I have for breakfast?', rather than `This needs a lot of thought. I'd better really think about this one'."
What, then, is solid, long-term decision-making?
Petrie is keen on the approach of best-selling author Steven Johnson, presented in his 2018 book Farsighted: How we make the decisions that matter most.
In the book, Johnson presents what he calls the "full spectrum" analysis process that he says is used by successful decision-makers. That process involves mapping (identifying variables and plotting possible paths), predicting (using a variety of techniques to explore likely outcomes of the possible paths) and deciding (aided by a scenario-scoring approach based on maximising value and minimising harm).

Complete article : https://www.odt.co.nz/lifestyle/magazine/decisions-pipeline