Council Planning and Finance Committee

Thank you, Your Worship. Yes, I'm not Phil Becker. He's had to take some sick leave, so Moana and I are going to give Council an update, verbal only. So we're going to cover national, regional, and just local circumstances, in particular how it affects our services, and I'll go through some points and I'll be happy to take questions. So nationally, obviously if you have been following the news, there's a massive disruption in the Middle East and that is creating a situation for the government to declare clear, you know, a nationally significant event in that sense. MBIE is the lead agency and in that context in managing supply and working with industry and working with local government and regional government, we are falling in behind their direction. So we are operating within a national framework right now. You know, if you've been following the news, the stocks are adequate, that's both land and sea-bound stocks. So that's calculated by what they have in the pipeline, if you like. You know, but the pressure is pretty real. There's some localised issues that are popping up and you'll see that at the fuel stations. The demand, we understand, is running at 15% above normal for this time of year. And so we're seeing a little bit of that anxiety with residents and grabbing the fuel. The on-water situation is— there's twofold elements to this. You have your storage in the nation on land, and then you have your storage that's en route from the refineries. And we've got several ships on the way. And you heard the Minister yesterday talk about some of the disruption that Australia is experiencing as well. In particular for us, you know, the bottom line is that whilst We've got fuel on the way, we're not actually sure what's happening in the Middle East, we don't know how supply will disrupt in the future, so this is why Ambi's working to get ahead of this and working with local government. The role of elected members, similar to your emergency management briefing yesterday, you know, your community leadership's going to be really important here, your comms as the situation develops and any future decisions that may impact our service. We'll bring those to you and advise you accordingly. So I'm just gonna touch on pretty quickly where the regional plan is at. We've been working with REMO for quite some time now, certainly over the last 2 weeks. We have a regional fuel plan. That's not the same as the national fuel plan, but we are prepared, we've had it, and are working on analysing and understanding how our consequences might fold out supply is constrained. We've got 5 phases under that. We're really in that monitoring and preparation phase at the moment. So we, as I said, we stood up the team in an incident point of view about 2 weeks ago, and we've been working with REMO and other councils in that area. We internally have set up an oversight group. We've got a couple of executives sitting on that, mostly in our fuel-hungry areas of of our operations, so, you know, James Roberts and Jenny Chetwin in particular, and we've got, as I said, an incident management team working to gather some intelligence from the business about how their business continuity plans are going to play out and how we can kind of start to predict a protracted fuel shortage on the services we provide. The two key areas of impact that we've identified to date is waste, our waste services. So obviously rubbish collection is a public health issue. We want to make sure we're on top of that. Our contract EnviroWaste is prepared for this. We have actually on-store supply at the tip that will allow us to operate for about a month. EnviroWaste also has storage as well, and that relates of course to the various contracts they have throughout the region. The other component of course is our transport network, because as you get various issues relating to how we maintain our network and the fuel required to maintain it, we have to actually use that as a priority to determine emergency services getting to places they need to be and serving the community. Anywhere near accordingly, whether it's ambulance, fire. So that is another area of primary focus for us to ensure that our roading contractors and our roading maintenance program is a priority as we head towards a protracted constrained environment from a fuel point of view. A little bit of an update from Greater Wellington, they're part of our regional emergency management group. They've been quite active in the space. They have actually met with the Minister recently. They in fact met with AT and ECAN. Those three entities combined, you know, afford about 89% of New Zealand's public transport infrastructure and carry quite a big load. So they've just been approaching government and saying, look, we're ready to help. We're happy to get in behind you and us to promote public transport throughout the region. And they have advised us that their fleet is 25% electric, so the bus fleet, though they're quite exposed in terms of their diesel fleet component there. Metropolitan Rail Network of course is electric except for the Wairarapa Line which is of course diesel. They're out and spreading the word about public transport, that they want us to help and get them behind public transport message and so we'll be doing that, and they're of course also contributing to the regional picture from an emergency management point of view in terms of prioritisations and getting good information so we can make good decisions. Just in terms of Dubsea Seas Fleet, our fleet is 43% electrified, but a lot of our heavier equipment, mostly in the parks area, diesel, so As we go through this process of quantifying what this impact might look like, we'll be preparing plans to prioritise our services accordingly. So that's pretty much all I have, Councillors. I would encourage you to jump on the Teams chat. Moana, as you know, has run a kind of council interface when we do have emergencies. There was the wind warning, of course, event, and the swell event. So we'll open one up today. We'll put in some resources and tools for you in there, some links. I do encourage everyone to sort of default to the MBIE material. There's some really good information on that website and that's a lot of the public are getting information from them as they are taking the lead. So we'll continue as an organisation to understand, you know, what are the circumstances that will happen as this supply issue persists and what sort of decisions you might need to make in the future from a services point of view. But I'll close off there.

Yeah, so contract management, good point. Councillor, absolutely, contract management's a focus. Obviously, you know, contracts vary from fixed price to other types. It is a real issue and it's something we're looking at as part of our situational awareness gathering. Just a point on Councillor Tiffenbach's matter and his own lived experience from his business point of view, this will have quite a long tail to it. I think he's been really clear that, you know, once we have the supply that they've said we have on the way, both on land and on sea, we don't fully understand the impact on the industry in the Middle East yet. And that as, as a result, the disruption will have a tail effect. So the petrochemical industry touches on a lot of things, plastics, and to Karl's point, has very direct impacts on businesses. So there's likely a response, which we're doing at the moment. A normal emergency management situation was you'd have an event, you'd respond to it, you recover. Here we can see an event unfolding in front of us, so we're actually in an inverse sense planning for it before it hits. But we will have to think about those types of things in the long term, because there will be disruption that we'll have to manage.