Report on Mt Maunganui landslide risk unread: Tauranga City Council

Tauranga councillors had a detailed report showing there was a high risk people could die if their local campground got hit by a landslide but no one read the report.

The council said that despite the report being in an August 2025 council agenda, it was not read and the meeting never happened.

Five months after the meeting was cancelled, six people were killed in a landslide as debris came off Mount Maunganui and covered a large area of the campground.

Retired High Court Justice Paul Davison KC found information identifying a risk to life was received, filed, discussed, forwarded and then left.

But on Wednesday, when his report was released, council chief executive Marty Grenfell told RNZ that no senior staff saw those reports.

"These reports were never escalated to a point where anybody at a senior level within the organisation could provide guidance, direction, and ensure that they were appropriately managed."

Grenfell said the reports stayed at "operational level".

"Our systems were such that from an organisation perspective, we weren't aware that these reports were being commissioned."

However, the council's own website showed that a June 2025 geo hazard report was included in an August agenda.

It says the rock stability monitoring report was sent out along with the meeting agenda, but the meeting was cancelled so none of the councillors actually read it.

The chief executive's name is on the agenda's cover, but in a statement the council said this did not mean he read the information either.

A council spokesperson said the report itself cost more than $12,000. They said the meeting was cancelled because of concerns about the number of councillors able to attend, but they were not sure why it was never rescheduled.

Call for accountability

Local group Lobby for Good spokesperson Erika Harvey said it was even more concerning that the information was circulated but never read.

"How do you think the families feel now? Now, not only did they know, not only could they have prevented it, but actually nobody actually cared to read it.

"You cannot tell me that this is just something that you should say, oh well, we'll learn next time from this. This is worse than a systemic failure. This is a governance failure. This is, in my opinion, this is negligence.

"If no one's reading anything and you can just use that as an excuse not to know what's going on, when you're paid more than the Prime Minister - over $600,000 Marty gets paid, more than the Prime Minister - to run a town, a city. Could you imagine if the Prime Minister said that? Oh sorry, we didn't know. I didn't get the report and six people died."

She said she had lost faith in the system and that someone needed to be held accountable.

"Now there's a document that says it could have been prevented, along with a report, and here's how much it could have been prevented but now nobody read it."

Echoes of CTV collapse

It brought back memories for a man whose wife died in the collapse of the CTV building during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

Maan Alkaisi from the CTV Families Group said they also waited for answers, accountability and justice but that the councillors failing to read their own report was proof that local government was not learning from previous failings.

"That really of course resonates with what happened with the CTV, because there were two reports explicitly highlighting a risk of collapse in case of earthquake and yet no action was taken."

He said it was disappointing and concerning that after 15 years nothing appeared to have changed.

"The whole idea from all these investigations, royal commissions, and police and ... WorkSafe and all that - they conduct investigations and they make recommendations and then none of these recommendations [have] actually been followed up or implemented, and we risk more people and more people lose their lives, and we know that this is preventable.

"We should learn from experience and prevent bad things from happening to others. I mean, this is very basic."