You can’t beat Wellington on a good day” the saying goes.

It also seems you cannot beat Wellington, or at least its City Council, when it comes to public relations disasters.

Earlier this year, following years of mismanagement of and underinvestment in the city’s water system, the Council in conjunction with other local Councils, established a new entity, Tiaki Wai, to better and more transparently manage the region’s water resources. Part of the plan was that there would be a separation between what ratepayers paid for water services and their rates to local authorities, so that they could see more clearly the true cost of water services.

It all seemed reasonable and relatively sensible – which would have been a first in itself for Wellington Councils when it comes to service delivery – until it came to the implementation of the plan. Until that point, ratepayers appeared to have a measure of confidence that with Andrew Little as Mayor, unlike the shambolic regimes which preceded him, the process of change would run smoothly.

But Tiaki Wai and the Wellington City Council have managed to destroy that cautious confidence in one fell swoop. Little had been making some ground with his assurances that the impact on ratepayers’ pockets would be minimised because the removal of water services from the rates bill would lead to a corresponding reduction in rates payments.

However, when Tiaki Wai started sending out its first quarterly water bills to ratepayers late last month, the proverbial quickly hit the fan. Ratepayers were receiving bills for hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars for water services, leaving many to take the Mayor’s continuing assurances of a corresponding downwards adjustment in their coming rates bills with a large, grain of salt.

In recent years Wellingtonians have been paying some of the highest rates increases in the country – nearly 17% in 2024/25 and 12% in 2025/26 under former Mayor Tory Whanau. This year’s rates increase of just under 6%, the lowest for years, looked set to offer some relief until Tiaki Wai came along. It is already projecting that the average household cost for water will rise from nearly $2,400 this year, to nearly $4,000 in 2030/31 and almost $6,000 in ten years’ time.

Faced with these projections from Tiaki Wai’s faceless bureaucrats, Wellington ratepayers have every reason to be sceptical of the Mayor’s assurances on rates relief.

Having said that, most Wellington people know that water services in the capital have been mismanaged for decades and that change and additional substantial investment in infrastructure was long overdue. The frequent bursting of the city’s ancient pipes had made Wellington a bit of a national joke, so it was clear something had to be done.

That is not the problem. Rather, the issue is that Tiaki Wai and its new leadership seem to have gone about their task with the typical insensitivity and blind enthusiasm bureaucrats always show when they consider the cause they are working on more important than the concerns of the public they are working for. And because of that, they have left their political masters with large portions of smelly egg on their faces.

Surely, there could have been better co-ordination between Tiaki Wai and the Wellington City Council about the timing of bills being sent to ratepayers? Why was it not possible to send out the Tiaki Wai bills the week after the Council’s rates demands that people could see that the Mayor’s assurances were being honoured? Did none of the 22 communications staff Tiaki Wai employs and the City Council’s 50 communications staff foresee the angry public reaction that has now occurred and propose strategies to mitigate that? Were they not even talking to each other? And where were the city’s local politicians whose noses might be expected to be more acutely attuned to such things and notice the perception problem they were creating?

Given the performance of both the Council and Wellington Water, Tiaki Wai’s predecessor, over recent years, it simply beggars belief that anyone in either of those organisations could have seriously believed that sending out new, separate water bills in advance of a rates demand that may or may not contain a corresponding reduction in charges would be a winning strategy.

Yet, that is what has happened, and the Council’s response has been ho-hum at best, although admittedly somewhat better than Tiaki Wai’s callously dismissive “we’re just doing our job” response. The Mayor has plaintively repeated his assurances that people will see the full picture and all will be better when they get their rates bill. So far he has done nothing to proactively advance those assurances.

Under the Whanau regime, long-suffering Wellington residents became used to having a Council that was a byword for incompetence. They thought those days were over when the new Council took office last year. The Tiaki Wai fiasco is quickly disabusing them of that notion.

Wellingtonians are proud of the “you can’t beat Wellington on a good day” mantra. But they are far from proud that their city’s leaders continue to make them a national laughing stock by their insensitive and badly managed actions.