meeting on September 1<\/a>, councillors formally accepted his findings and committed to implementing his recommendations.<\/p>\nThe money approved today would go towards recruiting and appointing an independent Organisational Improvement Programme director, resources to further refine the programme plan, and to get on with immediate risk framework and council culture change actions.<\/p>\n
A report authorised by strategy, partnerships and growth general manager, Christine Jones, said Davison\u2019s review identified weaknesses in the council\u2019s risk management, governance, decision-making and organisational culture.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/fresh-mt-maunganui-slip-a-reactivation-of-januarys-fatal-lan-QEILSYEI75AORLNEWJVQCL2NRI.png\")
<\/p>\n
The fatal January 22 landslide killed six holidaymakers in a council-owned campground. (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n
In response, staff developed a plan to implement Davison\u2019s recommendations and strengthen the council\u2019s capability to identify, understand and manage risk, and escalate action.<\/p>\n
The staff report said more work was needed to confirm what resources and budgets the programme would need, as well as to establish success measures and refine the timeline.<\/p>\n
The programme of changes was expected to be delivered over an \u201cintense\u201d 18-month period.<\/p>\n
Deputy Mayor Jen Scoular told senior staff the council had known about the risk reports \u2013 which Davison found had not been properly acted on \u2013 since a few days after the landslide.<\/p>\n
She criticised the narrative that staff were \u201climited in time\u201d, saying the organisation should have been working through risk navigation since day three.<\/p>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/the-six-victims-of-the-mount-maunganui-landslide-lisa-anne-m-HLROESSBFZFXDDA42EURBVUDWA.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
The six victims of the Mount Maunganui landslide: Lisa Anne Maclennan, 50; M\u00e5ns Loke Bernhardsson, 20; Jacqualine Suzanne Wheeler, 71; Susan Doreen Knowles, 71; Sharon Maccanico, 15; and Max Furse-Kee, 15. (Source: 1News)<\/p>\n
The plan said the council had an existing risk management framework but Davison identified significant gaps in its application, governance, integration, oversight and supporting culture.<\/p>\n
The report said the programme would have four workstreams.<\/p>\n
A risk framework workstream would provide leaders with a clear line of sight to the organisation\u2019s most significant risks.<\/p>\n
An emergency management workstream would cover planning, preparedness, response, recovery and continuous improvement required to manage emergency events across the organisation.<\/p>\n
A systems and tools workstream would focus on ensuring information, records and organisational knowledge that support decision-making were captured, accessible and effectively managed across the organisation.<\/p>\n
A culture and relationships workstream would ensure the council has the culture and behaviours needed to support good decisions, clear accountability and safe outcomes.<\/p>\n
A publicly accessible progress tracker was proposed to see how far away recommendations were from completion.<\/p>\n
The programme objectives included embedding a strong risk and accountability culture, strengthening organisation-wide risk processes, improving visibility, ownership and oversight of critical risks and enhancing emergency preparedness and response.<\/p>\n
The report said the programme was designed not only to implement Davison\u2019s recommendations, but also to \u201caddress underlying organisational conditions that allowed risks and warning signs to be missed, fragmented or insufficiently escalated\u201d.<\/p>\n
Not enough capacity for council staff to work on the programme was identified as a delivery risk.<\/p>\n
Tauranga Mayor Mah\u00e9 Drysdale said this work would need to be prioritised and other projects might have to sit in the background while this was focused on.<\/p>\n
\u201cWorkstreams may need to drop off for us to do this over something else, rather than just bringing in more people.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2013 LDR is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tauranga City Council has committed up to $500,000 to overhaul how it manages risk following damning findings from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69,1756],"class_list":["post-608643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-tauranga-bay-of-plenty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608643","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=608643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}