Sudden Closure due to suspected Black Mould By Simon Laube, ECC CEO In February this year a small community childcare centre based in Waitara reached out to ECC for help because they received a shock letter from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) terminating their lease. The centre, Waitara & District Community Childcare Centre (Waitara centre), had been operating from the site for decades, with many current teachers having themselves been children at the much-loved community centre, with further generations going through. Of course ECC had to step in to try to help our member. Initially ECC’s focus was on getting the centre more time – the termination notice gave them only 45 days. That just isn’t long enough to find a new site and have the MoE organise a licence. For people who don’t know, the establishment of a centre on a green or new site takes about 3.6 years on average (ECC submission, Feb 2022). LINZ’s termination letter did not say why the lease was being terminated, but defensively asserted they were only required to give one month notice. We were told by the Waitara centre team that they believed LINZ was terminating the lease because the property was connected to a Treaty settlement process (underway for many years, and still underway today). The site needed to be cleared before its transfer. What they understood to be the motivation was based on verbal discussions with LINZ officials. Nothing in writing existed. I was actually on leave when the centre manager and treasurer Wendy Yandle reached out for help. My mother had passed away unexpectedly a couple of days before and I was in Dunedin. However, I recognised the unfolding crisis and was still able to rattle off an urgent letter to ministers to make a case for government intervention to help the Waitara centre. It seemed to me that LINZ was not acting reasonably, and the risks of closure looked extremely high. Initially I believed the termination was related to the iwi settlement process. The centre team did in fact have (and still has) an excellent working relationship with the local iwi. So ECC formed the view that the centre needed to remain open so the iwi could become the new landlord, just don’t cancel the lease please LINZ. However, there was also a nagging concern about the overall state of the building. Half of the building was visibly extremely rundown and disused. There had even been issues with leaks in the roof and there was water damage visible in a couple of the rooms within the licensed area of the centre. ECC wrote to ministers asking for an urgent meeting to be convened so the team at the centre could speak to the relevant officials. Meetings are usually a good strategy for sorting matters out more quickly. Emails and letters can be clumsy forms of communication especially where there is time pressure. The iwi also wrote to LINZ asking for a reversal of its position to terminate the lease. The urgent meeting happened on 26 February and it included officials from both LINZ and MoE. On the day of their urgent meeting I was busy in an ECC board meeting. At the end of my board meeting I got an emotional call from Wendy telling me that the centre was to be closed immediately due to suspected black mould. The suspected black mould was conveyed verbally by the LINZ team to the centre team in the meeting – it obviously came as a huge shock to the centre team. Once revealed, the danger of black mould left no alternative other than closure. Black mould is a major health risk if spores get inhaled. I will come to the bit about “suspected” in a minute. I felt angry about the way this information about there being black mould got conveyed to the centre staff. For one, I had no warning about it and neither did the centre. It is a bit like getting extremely bad news unexpectedly – maybe you shouldn’t give advance notice of the extremely bad news but surely you can send warning signals to the other party by saying things like – please ensure you bring a support person – or two. Or – “oh, you are not bringing so-and-so - maybe you should? [i.e. hint, hint]. The fact MoE was at the meeting might have been enough support from LINZ’s perspective. We will never know. The outcome is that a meeting that was supposed to find a solution to a too-brief termination notice period instead brought about a massive shock – sudden closure on 28 February. Only two days prior, ECC and the team at Waitara were optimistic about the urgent meeting as a way of extending the notice period. This couldn’t have been further from officials’ intentions. July 2025 { 12 }
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