{"id":422380,"date":"2026-05-11T14:42:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-11T14:42:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/422380\/"},"modified":"2026-05-11T14:42:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-11T14:42:09","slug":"cost-jumps-for-landing-out-of-town-member-on-invercargill-committee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/422380\/","title":{"rendered":"Cost jumps for landing out-of-town member on Invercargill committee"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The cost of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.1news.co.nz\/2026\/04\/28\/council-spent-12k-getting-nelson-man-for-invercargill-job\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">recruiting an out-of-town member<\/a> to an Invercargill City Council committee has ballooned to almost double the amount previously reported.<\/p>\n<p>By Matthew Rosenberg of Local Democracy Reporting<\/p>\n<p>Last month, the council said it spent $12,268 landing Nelson-based Lee Babe for an independent member role on its water committee, noting that figure was to the end of February.<\/p>\n<p>It has since revealed the final amount was $23,658.<\/p>\n<p>The council did not comment further on the higher figure, saying manager governance and legal Michael Morris\u2019 previous comment still stood.<\/p>\n<p>Morris said recruitment agencies were used when roles were &#8220;very specialised&#8221;, and the costs in this situation were not out of the ordinary.<\/p>\n<p>He also noted the price tag included advertising for the role.<\/p>\n<p>The committee has previously discussed changing its regular 9am start time to later in the morning so Babe could complete a same-day round trip.<\/p>\n<p>On May 5, he attended his first meeting in-person at the regular start time.<\/p>\n<p>The Nelson-based chartered director also holds governance positions at Parallaxx, Network Tasman Ltd, Agfirst Consultants Nelson Ltd and council-controlled Kaik\u014dura Hurunui Water Services Ltd.<\/p>\n<p>Invercargill City Council&#8217;s water committee was established in November 2025, and Babe was officially appointed on April 28, 2026.<\/p>\n<p>The council has previously indicated it would pay Babe between $30,000 and $35,000 a year.<\/p>\n<p>\u2013 LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The cost of recruiting an out-of-town member to an Invercargill City Council committee has ballooned to almost double&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":422381,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[273,42,43,135,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-422380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-environment","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-politics","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422380","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=422380"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422380\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/422381"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}