A former mayor of Tauranga says warnings about the landslide risk on Mount Maunganui never reached him in his 12 years at the helm.

A damning review by former High Court judge Paul Davison KC found the council failed to act on several warnings over the course of 27 years about the risk of a slip on the nearby campground.

Stuart Crosby was mayor of Tauranga for 12 of those years, from 2004 to 2016.

"I watched online as Mr Davison gave his report, and to say it was confronting is an understatement," he said.

"Very disappointing in terms of the failure of processes within Tauranga City Council to get the right information to the right people to make the right decisions."

He said he hadn't been told about the slip risk.

"The areas that reached us were two, one was with regard to rockfall which we resources and addressed, and the second was to put in fire prevention," he explained.

"Certainly to the best of my knowledge I don't remember receiving any information about mitigating landslips."

He said it was a wake-up call for other councils.

"In fact, this morning I wrote an email to my own council, I'm on the Bay of Plenty Regional Council, requesting a report to go to our council with regard to information flow, and I'm sure this is happening up and down New Zealand," he said.

As for whether councils should look back through their records for any warnings they had missed, "I'm pretty sure they're doing it as we speak, I'm quite confident of that."

Dr Tom Robinson, a senior lecturer in disaster risk at the University of Canterbury, said the failings of Tauranga City Council weren't necessarily exclusive to it.

"What the report clearly shows is there are systematic errors, not just in Tauranga Council, that's the one that's been exposed here but those systematic problems that it's identified exist across the country," he said.

He echoed the sentiment that councils across New Zealand should consider the report a wake-up call.

"This is an opportunity for councils and organisations around the country to re-evaluate, look at some of the hazards and risks they're responsible for, and think about what actions they need to take," Robinson said.

"I think the problem, though, comes back to: councils have a huge amount of tasks and huge amounts of responsibilities, and dwindling reserves to be able to do that."

He said not enough money was spent on prevention.

"We've known for decades that a dollar spent on reduction reduces the amount you spend on response and recovery by 5, 7 or 10 dollars, you get the money back, and yet we're still putting the ambulance at the bottom of the hill and responding afterwards," he said.

"We really need to invest in getting in front of this."