Councillor

tangiwai baker

Whangārei Heads Ward

About

I am a first time Councillor, elected to represent the Whangārei Heads Ward at the local elections in 2025, with a term of three years. I'm a mother of four, small business owner and lawyer, living on a small farm in Whangārei Heads since 2014.

Our children have all been through Parua Bay School, where I served on the school board. My background includes government policy work, a Masters from London School of Economics, and service as a Disputes Tribunal Referee.

My focus is on roads and pipes working well, building and planning for extreme weather events, tough decisions about cutting costs while looking after our community and communication from and to the members of the ward.
- Community Development
- District Licensing Committee (Deputy Chair)
- Exemptions and Objections (Chair)
- Finance
- Infrastructure
- Risk and Audit
- Strategy, Planning and Development (Deputy Chair)
- Te Kārearea Strategic Partnership Standing Committee
- Issues and Updates
- Northland Forward Together
External organisations
- Bream Head Conservation Trust (Council appointed representative)
- Joint Regional Economic Development Committee (Alternate)

The ward, as the name suggests, covers all areas that come off Whāngarei Heads Road. It then runs north all the way to Ngunguru Road towards the coast just past Ngunguru Ford Road, and, in the other direction all the way past Sands Road, and encompassing nearly all of Whareora Road. It stops just before Onerahi and then dog-legs again just up Mackesy Road and into the Abbey Caves area. In some parts of the ward, we have a lot of long-standing community groups and in other areas less so. One of the challenges is to reach out to those less represented areas and see if we can get some representation happening.

ward boundaries

drop in sessions

Drop in session #1

8-9am the first Friday of every month at Smith & Local in Parua Bay
Drop in session #2

8-9am the second Friday of every month at Huanui Fresh on Ngunguru Road

facebook feed

Councillor Baker on Facebook

The place to start is here: https://www.wdc.govt.nz/Council/Contact-us/Report-it.
When you "Report It" tick the box saying you want an acknowledgement, then you get a tracking number, an automatic acknowledgment, and you go in the system to have your issue resolved within 15 working days (you may get a response quicker than this, it depends on the issue). If you want me to know about the issue, send me the tracking number at this stage and a summary.
From there, if it is not resolved, then email me and I can raise it further under a Councillor request mechanism. It's best to wait to see if it gets traction the standard route first, as raising the Councillor request can put a halt to the earlier reporting process, so potentially slow things down, and can use more resources of Council.