Christchurch mayoral candidate Sara Templeton has apologised after providing incorrect information on road renewals during a student podcast.
Chair of the Finance and Performance Committee, Sam MacDonald, who is backing Phil Mauger’s re-election campaign, released a statement on Thursday calling on Templeton to “correct comments” she made about Christchurch’s road resurfacing programme.
In the interview, Templeton said: “As a city, you’re supposed to do six to 7% of your roading network a year, and by the end of the last term, under Lianne, we were up to 5% post quake. That’s dropped down to sit at 1% so it would take us 100 years to renew all the roads in the city, if we keep it at that rate.”
However, a Christchurch City Council spokeswoman said “We have a Level of Service to resurface >= 4% of the sealed road network each year. Last financial year we resurfaced 6.5% (138.6km),” she said.
MacDonald said: “Councillor Templeton needs to correct her comments around the road resurfacing work we do within Christchurch. The misinformation is not helping the city rebuild trust and confidence in its council.
Read more: Sara Templeton re-election interview
“We work hard to rebuild trust and confidence in council and to focus the organisation on delivering results, and to share something so blatantly incorrect is not helpful. As Clr Templeton has said constantly, she wants to run a campaign based on facts and evidence. This is not helpful. Clr Templeton needs to publicly correct her statements.”
Templeton apologised for the error and told Chris Lynch Media she was disappointed in MacDonald’s approach.
“I’m disappointed to see this attack style politics still coming from Cr MacDonald.
“If he had bothered to check with me he would have known that I was aware of the mistake and had already contacted Canta to correct it before publication.
“Unfortunately the podcast had come out ahead of schedule. The team at Canta are great and have already removed the video and will fix the error.
“Our staff do an amazing job and have made the budget we allocate go a long way and, so I apologise for any concern this may have caused the organisation.”
