Ms Gladding said were she to be stripped of her committee roles at an extraordinary council meeting called for Tuesday, it would be just another example of the council "bending procedure and overriding the rights of others to achieve their objectives".
She has apparently earned the ire of a majority of her councillor colleagues after going public after a public-excluded briefing to councillors last week.
An officers’ report recommends removing her from two committees — audit, finance and risk, and infrastructure — the latter of which she is deputy chair.
It says the vote is a response to a request from the "majority of council" for "clear and intentional breaches" of standing orders — rules in the Local Government Act governing the conduct of council and committee meetings.
In a statement, Cr Gladding said she did not believe she broke council "code of conduct" rules as she did not accept the information given at the brief was confidential in nature.
"If councillors can sit in a meeting ... and remove a councillor from committees based solely on the staff’s view of what the community has a right to know and what it doesn’t, then we have a big democratic problem on our hands.
"The community voted me in — it pays my wages — and I have responsibilities to the community that are written into the law."
By deciding to directly discharge treated wastewater from the Shotover wastewater treatment plant, the council was "potentially unlawfully withholding information" and breaching its statutory responsibilities, she said.
The move to oust Cr Gladding from the committees was instigated by audit, finance and risk committee independent chairman Stuart McLauchlan — a Dunedin-based company director — in a letter to Mayor Glyn Lewers on Wednesday.
The report says the briefing was an update, including legal advice, on an enforcement order and mediation relating to the council’s breaches of the council’s resource consent for the plant’s malfunctioning disposal field.
The enforcement order, lodged in the Environment Court in January by the Otago Regional Council, triggered mediation between the two councils that continues.
"While council acknowledges Cr Gladding and all elected members may hold differing views on any matter . . . they should not disclose confidential information or criticise individual members of staff and must respect the majority decisions of council," the report says.
The fact she had undergone a code of conduct process in 2020, also for disclosing confidential information, meant she understood the potential consequences.
She accepted she "knowingly committed a significant breach", so the stripping of her committee roles would avoid the time and expense of a code of conduct investigation.
The report noted Ms Gladding was sent a letter of sanction by Mr Lewers last July for breaching the code of conduct in a podcast interview.
The council confirmed on Wednesday it would invoke emergency provisions in the Resource Management Act to begin discharging about 12,000cu m of treated effluent into the river each day.
The discharge is expected to start on Monday or Tuesday.
