Paul Zannen

Growth and Development Manager, Buller District Council,
formerly with the New Brighton Business and Landowners Association and Regenerate Christchurch

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Paul has recently been appointed as Growth and Development Manager for Buller District Council. This followed a period on secondment to the council from Joseph Associates, where he had responsibility for overseeing the Westport master planning process following the Buller river floods in 2021 and 2022. Before this he worked in Regenerate Christchurch on hazard mitigation in South Shore, New Brighton, an appointment that followed his initiation of the New Brighton Business and Landowners Association in the wake of the earthquakes. In his current council role, he is leading the climate adaptation process in Buller, building on his earlier experiences in Christchurch.

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How did you get involved in red zone issues in Christchurch?

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I'm the Growth and Development Manager for the Buller District and have been heading up adaptation planning here. After the earthquakes in Christchurch, I was based in New Brighton with a little cafe down on Carnaby Lane. I started making a bunch of noise about the state that New Brighton was in post-earthquakes. Obviously there's a long history to New Brighton, all the way back to the time when it was the only place in the country where retailing was allowed at weekends. In hospitality you have a lot of public facing, as you're talking to hundreds of people every day and it was pretty apparent that there were feelings of discontent there. 

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The community and the social capital was really high, with lots of community groups and interest both in the recovery and how to use what had happened from the response phase into the recovery phase, and then really starting to look at what transformation for the area looked like. So, being quite naïve about the way that the public sector works, I had a look at who the local councillors were. Peter Beck was one of ours at the time. So I just gave him a call. He came out to New Brighton to the cafe and we ended up having a really interesting sit down. We talked about the planning framework that was coming up for the suburban centres and what was happening in New Brighton in that respect and some of the needs in terms of the community board and governance of the local area and how local participation could occur. So I got really heavily involved from pretty much that point [about 2013] onwards. 

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I set up the New Brighton Business and Landowners Association (NBBLA) which was basically putting a dome over the commercial core with a strong governance structure to work alongside the planning process from an on-the-ground landowners’ and business perspective, rather than being based only on community engagement. The NBBLA gave us a platform for advocacy. It was a real learning space for me; it went outside of its charter so many times. New Brighton is basically a village with a local identity on the side of Christchurch, so you end up branching into all these different spaces. It put us into different conversations about what was happening around the New Brighton area residentially, what was happening socially around deprivation. Then you started getting into the school merger side of things and all of a sudden it started branching us into Evan Smith's worldview. Evan and I ended up meeting quite a bit and got a really good friendship. Both he and Peter were major influences in my life. It was like having comets coming in essentially. It just completely altered a lot of things for me. 

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And it showed how much social capital was missing in some of the conversations that were already happening in the public sector. It was a heck of a journey to go from moving back to Christchurch, to being in New Brighton, to having a business, to setting up the NBBLA and all of a sudden stepping into this recovery space. There was this real feeling of discontent and of being ignored in the east, even though the trauma was so high. Even my wife used to get ropable driving to the west where she would see people in Memorial Ave planting new gardens. and we were shitting in buckets. It felt like this disparateness between almost like nothing had happened to a complete disaster scenario, and for me that twisted a few internal moral dials. 

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It was like we've got beautiful people working together constructively in Brighton. We had a platform in terms of what we'd done with the community advocacy side of things, and then starting to apply that thinking to a wider area. We were at the end of the potential city to sea corridor. But it did feel like others saw Brighton as something you scraped off the bottom of your shoe, but for people living there, it was a whole different worldview: how lucky we were with the natural amenities, the lifestyle, the community itself, and there was just so many different kind of things going on. So with Evan starting up his work with both Eastern Vision and the Avon Ōtākaro Network (AvON), I just started clipping into the edges of that conversation. And then began to meet Humphrey Rolleston and Lianne Dalziel, and Hayley Guglietta and Sarah Butterfield and it kind of became this big coalition of the willing. Quite magical. 

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Out of those disasters, it was quite amazing what you could see coming through in social capital from people. It rips off the things that you think people wouldn't be able to sit around and talk about. As we progressed further, CERA started winding up the land clearance programme, which sounds so awful when you really rewind that back to people's homes. Then all of a sudden, the conversation around Regenerate Christchurch started stepping up. I was still with the NBBLA and doing the cafe, but it was really hard to get an adequate funding for grassroots staff, really hard. But we had done a lot of lobby work by then with the city council and the politicians too. We had just gone through the suburban centres master planning process. And yet, when we looked at the council’s Long-Term Plan (LTP), its 10-year financial strategy, there was zero dollars attached to it. So they’d just taken the community through design of the New Brighton Suburban Plan, but not attached any resource to it. There was no budget. We kicked up a pretty big stink at that point. 

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We put in lots of submissions to the LTP hearings, and everyone said that they wanted to speak to their submission. That would have taken about three and a half months of meeting schedules with council. That got us to the table in a meaningful capacity so we could say that we'll follow your process in the long-term plan, but you are under-resourcing, under-appreciating, you're not putting the capital spend forward. That is when Lianne [Dalziel, the mayor] had their council meeting out in the North Brighton Surf Club and announced the seed funding for the New Brighton Hot Pools. And what it also did was actually put us in the Greater Christchurch Regeneration Act [which set up Regenerate Christchurch]. It meant that Regenerate Christchurch would pay attention to the central city and the residential red zone, and also have a look at New Brighton. There was a reason for that addition, and that came down to the grassroots lobbying and advocacy, which was pretty loud and proud for a wee while. If I knew what I knew today, I probably would have taken a different approach. But it worked. It got us to the table in a meaningful capacity. 

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What was your role at Regenerate Christchurch?

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When Regenerate got stood up, I got the phone call to go and give them some preliminary advice on New Brighton and what its role could be. It was originally targeted at the commercial centre before Development Christchurch [DCL, also set up under the 2016 Act] was stood up at the same time as well. There was a bit of competition between agencies as to who was going to do what to really expedite some of the delivery that you're now starting to see find feet 12 years later. I went into Regenerate Christchurch at that point and already had a good long-standing relationship with Evan and Peter. I was on Eastern Vision too, the informal group that basically wanted to make sure that East Christchurch got that sense of betterment.

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I was working at Regenerate on the South Shore, South New Brighton regeneration strategy, which was a big learning curve in terms of the work that I'm doing now in Westport. There's a lot of lived experience which has come full circle and been incredibly useful in terms of having those community conversations, but it also put me into the wider residential red zone forward works sort of programme. I did a lot of the front-facing community engagement stuff alongside a real good team with Alana Hema and Chris Mene obviously heading that group up. I ended up working across the teams and then front facing a lot of the delivery on the ground in the Cashel Street exhibition [of the draft regeneration plan in 2018] and stuff as well for that engagement process around future use. 

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There’s really difficult engagement when people's futures are involved; there's a lot of tears shed and a lot of psychosocial support for people as well. Really difficult conversations while there's a utopian vision and a reality check as well. There's people that still were really hurt. I think a big lesson for me is how long this sticks with people. It turned a lot of people's lives completely upside down. But the sort of the grassroots advocacy that Evan and Peter were pushing was pretty inspirational as well, and it did show that when there's enough people working together at that level, you can influence change really positively for communities. But boy, you need some stubborn bastards in there who just won't roll. That's where Evan came in, similar to myself with no formal education training and background in this and yet what an animal he was. He was one of my big mentors: he knew how to talk with empathy and respect and love to the land and the people, and then how to translate into red lines not to cross when he was dealing with the public sector as well, which is difficult. 

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There's stuff that I've learned in terms of how the public sector functions and works, without the same agility and not the same expectations as people have on ground. You see it nowadays more and more in that lack of trust in the public service. It's not that people are doing bad jobs or having nefarious plots but the two systems really struggle to meet each other. Peter Beck and I termed it the ‘cha-ordic’ system, where you've got a system of complete order and structure meeting essentially what is a spiderweb of chaos. And when those two systems meet, they really struggle. And I remember Peter and Evan saying there's a spot in the middle there where the cha-ordic joiners basically work. If you just straight try and put them in, it's not going to work. You've got to be able to weave those together. And it takes so much patience and persistence to find some common ground. Now that I'm in the public sector [in Buller district], I make sure that that cha-ordic operating model is front and centre. All the community engagement work we're undertaking here operates under that model with an agility and flexibility to meet people meaningfully. This has been one of the outcomes of my work in South Brighton. 

How did the South Brighton project end?

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It didn't end all that well there, to be honest. The project started really well. Originally Regenerate Christchurch was specifically looking at the commercial centre. But there were the usual issues between one agency and it was pretty apparent that DCL had that mandate. So Regenerate Christchurch's scope changed and pivoted south to the South Shore and South Brighton communities. They had small slivers of red zoning running along the estuary edge where there was subsidence and damage to some of the informal protection measures along the estuary. Then, all of a sudden, the storms started coming through and people were watching the estuary edge get eaten away.

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There was a lot of conversation in the community about why are we not getting these protection measures back? And once again, a feeling of what's good for one side of the water is not the same as for the other. People were looking across at Redcliffs and Sumner and seeing the new coastal pathway and the hard defences going in there. They had a similar level of exposure and yet they were getting tens of millions of dollars and here we are sitting with a naturalising edge without any concept of what the future looks like. This tipped Regenerate Christchurch into a space of looking at hazard management and I think this is where eventually DPMC [Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet] got really uncomfortable. It looked at it and went, right, this puts us into a long-term planning framework. So starting to look at a 50- to 100-year building and consent window. 

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At its start, it was magic. It really was. There was a community group already working down there who were starting to look at the ‘how’ of engagement. That was Sylvia Smythe and a whole team around her from Renew Brighton as well. They were looking at how to engage with communities around really complicated forward planning, the importance of the spiderweb and social networks in community, building trust. You see that idealistic sort of 10-step adaptation cycle from the Ministry for the Environment, which you take the rough idea of, but you've got to break it apart and put it back together to suit your own community. Never follow the 10-step cycle because it doesn't work. It’s the importance of how to engage rather than just what to engage on. 

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So the project brought together the community stakeholder representatives, teasing out the engagement strategy while the agency was starting to look at what the forward work programme was. It was starting to warm up: we had the hub down in South Brighton and it was starting to get into sort of that vision-y space. And then I think political pressure was coming on every agency, including Regenerate Christchurch. The board changed at that point and there was pressure coming through where people were going, well, now that it's done a lot of the residential red zone, why is it getting involved here? I think those questions started coming from way up the food chain asking is this a precedent-setting exercise? The council's not ready to have this conversation quite yet. And it ended up getting spiked, pretty quick. I don't know exactly what happened; certainly I wasn't privy to any of that, but gut feel says somebody got very uncomfortable with us looking at how to address these long-term challenges, both in terms of the physical protection, but also the what-if scenarios. You know, if you extrapolate those hazards out over time, like, yeah, there's stuff to deal with. 

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I think they were concerned about precedent setting. In Christchurch, the scale of the residential red zoning and the buyout program has essentially set a precedent, either legally or in the mindset in New Zealand, that the cavalry will always come. When you step into forward planning and potential future hazards and start thinking of recommendations, you're starting to lean into issues of who pays and the inquiries around adaptation. It was really aspirational. I still maintain that the early stages were on point to try and rebuild trust between the public and the public sector, which was really low and is an ongoing problem everywhere. It's not unique as such. But after a disaster and after a lack of forward progression for people, it exacerbates that distrust, right? 

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They're pointing at a problem and it's not getting resolved. Why not? I think where we're trying to heal that discontent in those communities while we're actually looking at the forward planning of how do we look at those protection measures, at what point do they not work anymore? It would have been such a good demonstration project. That's why everybody was really excited at the start, because it's those nuts that can't be cracked. And that's the thing. That was the whole point in setting up these groups or agencies or work streams: you are there to crack the impossible nuts. And the community really was starting to step up and be willing. And then it kind of just got spiked. 

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I left in a pretty big grump, to be honest, and kind of threw my toys in. I hadn't had enough foresight, learning, or experience to realize there's a difference between being a martyr and a catalyst. And I think I ended up starting to get into the martyrdom where I was burning out significantly. And then pretty much at the end when the project really was getting spiked and the agencies are going, we're out. Having to tell a community that you've built trust with for years in your work streams in life, and then saying, trust me, I've joined this agency. Trust me, trust me, trust me. If you can't trust an agency, trust me as an individual because we know each other. I have to be accountable because I live here. I will not do wrong. And everybody else in the project was the same, right? This isn't an individual heroic exercise. There's really good people working on this. I've also lived in that community. The situation to me was untenable, because when you put your own morals at the front of your project, you're not hiding behind a banner: those are you and your morals that are now at question. But I had said to that community publicly so many times, if I smell this going sideways, I'll walk out that door. 

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And then I actually had to go out to that community and do an apology to it and say, I thought we were onto something. I really did. I thought we were setting up an operating model that was new, it was innovative, it was community designed and supported. So I left it on a pretty bad note and essentially burned out. Hit a brick wall for the next probably 18 months. It was pretty low. I certainly wasn't looking at taking anything big on any time soon or even poking my head out of the parapets. I think now we should have doubled down instead of backing out. It could be going in a couple of directions at this point. 

How do you see the situation in New Brighton now?

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I've still got a lot of friends and a lot of people I love and respect that live in South Brighton and South Shore. and they're still in exactly the same space. You see the same things, people complaining about the estuary edge. The physical protections aren't there that people were hoping for in that strip of residential red zone along the estuary edge. I know that Christchurch City Council has started its adaptation project, so it's looking obviously around the Lyttelton Harbour, and that's where we moved after New Brighton, to Diamond Harbour, so we saw them apply the adaptive pathway planning framework there. They did well in picking the easiest of the areas to look at, essentially, because it's not mass community scale. It's looking at public assets, you know, what can we do, at what point can we not raise the road, or when do we have to move pipes, et cetera. From my understanding, they're going be applying these to other areas. 

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So I think they're starting to look at the residential catchments now, but from what I can tell, the conversation hasn't really moved since 10 years ago. There hasn't been a concerted effort yet, and I know Council's stepping up its staff and building capacity and its teams and making sure they understand. But it'll be fascinating to see how they're going to revive a conversation that had started and stopped. And I think people often forget South Shore has the highest disposable income and education in the city. You have to do this in a way that actually works for people. You're going to have to really work alongside people here as well. I think there's a wealth of local knowledge there to lean into. People say it’s all about the data, but it’s not. It’s about trust and vision and hope and choice and opportunity in the future as well, while acknowledging that sometimes shitty conversations do need to happen. There are ways to do it, and that's probably the segue into Westport and what we've been doing here. 

How did this lead into your current development work in Westport?

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I was working for a niche consultancy in Christchurch called Joseph and Associates. I first joined up with them just before the Westport flood events of 2021 and 2022. They started helping council here in terms of some of the temporary accommodation providers and so forth. I got commissioned by council to do some work external on some of the funding applications to government. I was doing that from a Christchurch base. And then my boss said, the council needs some proper help: there's a two-year secondment over there. We'd always thought we'd move to the Coast at some stage, but it happened pretty quick. I ended up in a secondment role here in the Infrastructure Services Department, working under the GM. My second day in the office was the 2022 floods. It was quite an exciting start, one hell of a way to get to know people in place. I was tasked with setting up the evacuation centre for a few days, everything from ordering sandbags. I was in the operations part of the emergency operations team here. ​​​