Walking the plank and jumping ship

It’s hard not to feel sorry for Ron Janes, Wanganui Mayor Michael Laws’ erstwhile captain of enterprise – unless of course you’re a victim or member of the clean-up squad after his last foray into public service at the Wanganui Hospital Board. Or you may be one of those who believe that anyone, like Ron and the Visioneers, who thinks dancing with Mickey is the path to glory and riches deserves everything they get when the ship goes down.

You see, poor old Ron’s valiant efforts for the Vision cause was a nice little earner for him as chair of Wanganui Inc, presiding over Mickey’s events city meisterplan and fiddling while the ratepayers’ cash burnt at hopeless mayoral headline grabbers like the Boxing Day concert and mayoral mile.

How frightful, then, for Ron to hear from not one but two Chron reporters (and the sub-editor who gleefully reminded readers that the Chronic had been the first to tell Ron about the mayoral press release on the Council website) that like the souls he’d sacrificed in his slash and burn health system days, he too had been declared surplus to requirements:

THE news that Wanganui District Council has asked for the immediate resignations of Wanganui Inc directors as it takes control of the economic development agency took newly deposed chairman Ron Janes by surprise.

Mr Janes said he was used to business being conducted face-to-face and not in the way he was informed when the Chronicle rang yesterday to get comment.

Mickey knew the Winc game was up before the leftover Christmas turkey was cold, as LawsWatch was told by an anonymii conveniently privy to the innermost workings of the mayoral mind. But we’re now hearing the decision to pull finally pull the plug on Mickey’s merry band of Winc men came from none other special sub committee chair and mayor-in-waiting Dot McKinnon. that’s appropriate because it was Dotty and her sub committee that built the Winc golem in the first place and let it loose in the council coffers.

Moneybags Mickey, meanwhile, rides in on his white horse and tells us that $800,000 will continue to be tossed at ‘economic development’ (read events) by an increasingly well paid branch of the new boys’ network called Wanganui Holdings. But, says Mickey, ‘the estimated savings from the revised structure were between $65,000 and $95,000 a year’. Not even enough to cover the losses on the Boxing Day concert.

As we wait with bated breath for Deputy Dot to start covering herself in glory and pointing her electioneering finger at her ‘triumphs’ at the business end of Vision’s woeful term, it’s also worth noting a wee paragraph buried deep in the Chron(ic) story reporting (ex) Chairman Janes’s surprise at not being told he’d been given the boot:

Former director Nygllhuw Morris had already resigned two weeks previously: “I think Winc will be able to move forward, and I totally support them.”

So we can assume that Mickey had a word with his buddy Nygllyhuw, even if he didn’t have the bottle to pick up the phone and ring Ron. And Nygllhuw, doubtless with an eye to candidate nomination day, decided to jump the Winc ship in timely fashion without waiting for Dotty to march him down the gangplank. Or perhaps he was just too busy working on dottyandnygllhuw.co.nz, the sequel to michaelandlauren.co.nz which undoubtedly ranks as his greatest tribute so far to the fast-fading glory of Mickey Mayor.