In 2018, amid controversy over the failed merger of Pocket 8 Ball Club with the The Olde Establishment and the Putaruru District Services Memorial Club, then environmental health manager John Anderson advised the council not to conduct such an assessment. Councillors were told it could cost as much as $40,000 and that the special consultative procedure (SCP) carried out, sufficed. Based on the advice, most councillors voted in favour of conducting an in-house desktop study of data provided by the DIA instead. That was despite councillor Arama Ngāpō, who is now serving her second term on the council, raising concerns over whether an in-house study would be “unbiased”. By 2020 an internal review of the DIA’s handling of the failed merger came to reveal years of systematic failures and legal information being withheld from ministerial briefings.