Embattled Dunedin city councillor Benedict Ong has had restrictions placed on him regarding receiving confidential council information.<\/p>\n
He will not be permitted to attend non-public workshops.<\/p>\n
The moves came after he had repeatedly shared confidential material with media.<\/p>\n
Dunedin City Council chief executive Sandy Graham sent an email to Cr Ong this afternoon outlining steps the council would take to manage the situation.<\/p>\n
“I am doing so as a necessary step to prevent further unauthorised release of such information,” she said.<\/p>\n
Cr Ong then forwarded the email on to media.<\/p>\n
Ms Graham had earlier in the day requested an urgent meeting with Cr Ong.<\/p>\n
“I want to discuss with you whether you are prepared to comply with requests to maintain confidentiality when you are clearly asked to,” she said.<\/p>\n
Cr Ong also forwarded this email to media.<\/p>\n
He told media the restriction about confidential information was no big surprise.<\/p>\n
He saw it as a continuation of “false attacks” against him.<\/p>\n
In her email to Cr Ong this afternoon, Ms Graham said he would be free to attend all council meetings as usual.<\/p>\n
However, the way he received some information would change.<\/p>\n
“For public-excluded and confidential agenda items for a council meeting, I will make the agenda and any supporting papers available to you to read in hard copy, and subject to the requirement you do not take a copy away, nor take photos of them.<\/p>\n
“Your reading of such confidential papers will be supervised to ensure these requirements are followed. I need to take this step to manage the real and consistent risk of such information being released by you without authorisation.<\/p>\n
“Staff will work with you to arrange a suitable time and location once each council agenda has been published.”<\/p>\n
Ms Graham said she would review the arrangements “should you agree and demonstrate to me a willingness to no longer release confidential information without authority”.<\/p>\n
Cr Ong is facing a code of conduct complaint in relation to releasing confidential information.<\/p>\n
This resulted from sharing content relating to the possibility of a hotel being built next to Forsyth Barr Stadium in Dunedin.<\/p>\n
He then disclosed more information about the project to the Otago Daily Times.<\/p>\n
He also leaked a draft preliminary assessment about his conduct by investigator Steph Dyhrberg.<\/p>\n
His actions could be a serious breach of the standard of behaviour expected of elected representatives, she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Embattled Dunedin city councillor Benedict Ong has had restrictions placed on him regarding receiving confidential council information. He…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":417961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-417960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}