I am probably best known to most Dunedin people for the ten years I have been a DHB Board member. Seven of those years were spent as Chair and during that time I learnt a great deal about wringing waste out of a cash strapped system - simply increasing the rates was never an option! However, I am much more than a DHB Board member. I have always been involved in my community. In my late teens and through my twenties I was heavily involved in environmental organisations. I was deputy leader of the Values Party, heavily involved in the battle to prevent an aluminium smelter being built at Aramoana on Otago Harbour, and Chair of the Environment Centre in Dunedin. I trained as a Clinical Psychologist and after graduating was offered a position as a lecturer in psychological Medicine at the University of Otago Medical School. I resigned that position to work as the environment centre co-ordinator at the height of the smelter campaign. For several years I worked part time as a private practice clinical psychologist while my partner and I built the beginnings of what would become the Acquisitions chain of retail stores. This now extends to 11 stores from Auckland to Dunedin but Head Office is still firmly in Dunedin. 20 years ago I set up the Hawksbury Trust which provides homes for 125 intellectually disabled adults in Dunedin and Christchurch. I continue to Chair that 20 years later and it remains one of the most rewarding things I have ever been involved in. I have had other adventures along the way. Ten years ago I was asked to help turn around the fortunes of the Trade Aid Movement which was in danger of being forced to close. I spent 18 months as a Change Manager for them, returning them to profitability and substantially restructuring the whole organisation to avoid the problems that had threatened it. So, in many ways, my business has been a way for me to pay the mortgage while I do the many community things that I get real pleasure from. However, my time as a DHB Board Member has demonstrated to many in Dunedin just how effective I can be governing a local body. I want to take those skills and apply them to new challenges - and if anything has challenges it is certainly the DCC. I seek your support to do that.

Top 5 Issues

1. Dunedin is mortgagaed up to the hilt due to the stadium decision and a spendthrift Council. We cannot go on that way and I believe that we can, and must get control of our financial future. My time running a cash strapped DHB where waste had to be minimised and hard ecisions made equips me well for this
2. Dunedin lacks a long term vision that its people have bought into. We must determine our stre been consulted about and bought into. We must establish our strenths and weaknesses as a city and determine where we are going to focus our investment and scarce resources. I have skills in doing this
3. The Council need to take the creation of policy back into Councillors hands. They need to determine what they want the CEO to focus on and then build those requirements into his performance requirements. I have done this for many years in the DHB.
4. I see no sign that the DCC has made any effort to review their operational structures from a process perspective. Other Councils and organisations have taken much cost out of their operational structure by using "lean" aproaches. We need to free up the talent of our staff to do this but this starts at the top with the Mayor and Council demanding this of the CEO and the CEO actively driving the process. I will make this a priority.
5. Speeding up things like building and planning consents through a lean focus on Council processes. This is not rocket science but we are simply not driving it from the top.

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