Early local body election results see a familiar face stay on in Hauraki and a new mayor take the helm next door. KELLEY TANTAU reports
For one, it’ll be business as usual. For another, a rise up the district council ranks.
Preliminary results for the local body elections show Hauraki voters sticking with Mayor Toby Adams, while Thames-Coromandel elevates councillor Peter Revell to the top job.
As of Sunday night, Adams had earned 4694 votes, while Revell had 3669.
After acknowledging his clear win with a celebration in Paeroa with other successful candidates, Mayor Adams told The Profile that out of his 15 years in council, this campaign was particularly full-on.
“There’s normally always going to be people out there that don’t like you or don’t like your politics, and I 100 per cent get that. There’s also people that do like you. So, the supportive ones have been fantastic,” he said.
“I tried to shut out the noise, but it was more personal, I’ll say. Rather than just politics, it became very, very personal with one of the candidates invading personal space, and just the level of enquiries were more personal than ever before.”
As with his past bids for the mayoralty, Adams kept it simple on the 2025 campaign trail, and said “doing your job properly” was the best indicator of earning another term.
He was the only mayoral candidate who turned up to any of the Meet the Candidate events across the rohe.
“If you’re the incumbent mayor, you’re campaigning for three years by just doing your job properly, and if you’ve done your job properly, you’ll get a whiff of whether you’re the right person or not to stand,” he said. “If I was getting a sense that the community was over me, I probably wouldn’t have stood.”
But Adams was the clear victor. His closest competitor was out-of-towner Roman Jackson on 622 votes, followed by Waihi’s Levi Burton on 474, both new to local politics.
What surprised Adams, though, was the number of other experienced mayors ousted from their roles across the country – many of them female.
Three-term Selwyn mayor Sam Broughton conceded victory to Lydia Gliddon; seasoned Central Hawke’s Bay Mayor Alex Walker lost her campaign against Will Foley; Waikato District Mayor Jacqui Church was defeated in the polls by Aksel Bech; Susan O’Reagan from Waipā was ousted by Mike Pettit, and Tararua mayor Tracey Collis – who has been in the role since 2016 – was unseated by Scott Gilmore.
“All these good mayors with great knowledge and understanding of how it all works are gone, and I don’t think they’re gone for the reason that people think they’ve done a poor job,” Adams said. “I think they’re gone because some of these communities can’t comprehend these rising costs… and we don’t just do it to piss people off.”
While Adams has long been a familiar face around the council table, Revell isn’t exactly green himself.
The Thames-based father-of-four began his local politics career as a community board member before moving into a councillor role in 2022. On Saturday, he told The Profile a commendable campaign helped ease any election-day jitters.
“I was really content, I suppose, with the job that I had done in the campaign. There were a few things that I would do differently, but overall I felt that if I missed out, it’s not because I hadn’t done a decent job on the campaign. So, it hasn’t been a nervous day for me, but it has been a busy day,” he said.
Revell was getting ready to host family for his father-in-law’s 95th birthday celebrations on Sunday. His job – amid taking hoardings off the trailer and pulling nails out of wood – was to keep an eye on the bolar roast.
“We will sit around and do what families do, which is sit and chat and what have you,” he said. “There will be a certain topic – a flavour to the conversation – which will be around the change in my life that’s going to take place from Monday morning, but it will be very much a family weekend.”
Family and faith, Revell said, were two “fundamentals” of his life.
“We’ve got four kids, we’ve got 16 grandchildren… so we’ve got a bevy of young family, which is incredibly energising – and unbelievably chaotic at Christmas time,” he said. “My faith is a bedrock for me, really, and it’s one of those things that helps me confront the challenges of life.”
Revell said that while he was not surprised by the way the vote went, he acknowledged the disappointment that came hand-in-hand on election day.
“More people didn’t vote for me as mayor than did vote for me as mayor,” he said, alluding to the 2703, 2593, and 1268 votes cast for fellow candidates Patrick Kerr, incumbent Len Salt, and Denise Messiter respectively.
“So that’s a reality. There’s a whole lot of people out there who, in the mayoral outcome, will be disappointed because their candidate didn’t get over the line. And around the council table, there will be people who will be coping with real disappointment at the moment.”
An unexpected outcome was the close race in the Mercury Bay ward, he said, in which sitting councillors Deli Connell and Rekha Giri-Percival were nipped at the post by Flemming Rasmussen and former deputy mayor Tony Brljevich.
Coromandel-Colville candidate John Morrissey, who first won an uncontested seat on the Thames-Coromandel District Council in 2004 and served two terms, returned successfully in 2019 but was also edged out by newcomer Robert Ashman this election.
And in the vote to remove or retain Māori Wards, it was clear in both districts: with 6070 votes against and 4055 in favour in Thames-Coromandel, and 2947 votes against and 2058 in favour in Hauraki, the wards will be gone at the 2028 election.
“I’m not surprised that that’s the way the vote has gone,” Revell said, “because I’ve been campaigning around the district since the beginning of the year, and the more I was moving around the district, the more sense I got that the referendum was likely to be a no.
“But the reality is that we have got a Māori ward – we’ve got a Māori ward for the next three years, and we’ve got a very capable representative.”
Like Revell, Mayor Adams said he was looking forward to working with the Māori ward councillors while he could, but expressed disappointment in the timing of the referendum.
“I don’t know if the result would have changed if we had more voter engagement, but it’s just kind of disappointing that we were put in a position to do this before the community had actually experienced what Māori wards were, and could realise that it’s no big deal and it’s not about race, it’s just about diversity around the table,” he said.
Final election results are expected to be released on October 17, and in Thames-Coromandel, the new mayor, councillors, and community board members will be officially sworn in on October 31.
DETAILS: Full preliminary results can be found on the district council’s websites.
BY KELLEY TANTAU
