It will probably be another week before Cabinet decides who will run the Auckland council transition agency, Prime Minister John Key said today.
Local Government Minister Rodney Hide said this morning he expected to make an announcement today after Cabinet met, but ministers failed to come to an agreement.
Cabinet would take a bit more time over who would be on the agency board, Mr Key said.
"We are working on the make-up of that, just finalising the last name and who might chair that," Mr Key said.
"It's an important decision. It is going to be a very important agency over the next 18 months, we want to make sure we get it right." Mr Key said there was an issue that had to worked on, but would not say what this was, however he did say no name put forward by Mr Hide had been rejected by Cabinet.
There has been speculation about numerous names for what was expected to a be a five-person board -- among those names was John Hood, the former vice chancellor of Auckland University.
Dr Hood was the first outsider to be appointed Oxford University vice-chancellor in its 800-year history.
He was brought to Oxford, in England, in 2004 to tackle chronic financial problems.
His plans to introduce radical changes were killed off by a rebellion of academic staff.
Labour leader Phil Goff said the delayed announcement showed there was serious questions being raised over some of the nominees.
"It does show the situation is becoming chaotic," Mr Goff said.
"It is the Rankin effect, they have become gun shy about appointments." Auckland Mayor John Banks today said efficiencies from creating a council could reduce job numbers by 2700, he apologised for his comments later.
Mr Goff said the Government could not say what the cost of the reorganisation would be and was rushing ahead with their plans anyway.
Mr Key said there were be savings and greater efficiency from the combining the councils, but at this point anyone talking about numbers and names was just speculating.
It was important to have a transition agency working through merger issues, because otherwise the problems would be lumbered on the new council from the first day of taking office.
This meant finding a person with the right leadership and negotiating skills to head the agency, he said.
Among other things, the agency has the power to veto local bodies in the region and contracts worth more than $20,000.
Over the weekend Labour dragged out the debate on two bills to set up a single council in Auckland, but the Government introduced its own amendments to gazump Labour's efforts.
The first bill was passed into law and set up the concept of a single council and a transition agency to manage the change, while the second, which outlined broad detail about the council, was sent to a special select committee for submissions.
Mr Hide said before Cabinet today that the transition agency was the first step toward "crunching" the seven councils and regional authority into one organisation.
"The councils will continue as business as usual, but what they need is somewhere to go to say `look we're thinking of making this decision, would this compromise the new council and ratepayers into the future?'," he told Radio New Zealand.
There was already a list of names of those who would be on the transition agency.
Mr Hide would not say who was on the list.
