The public needs to have confidence in the Council. This will require the Mayor to lead a serious culture change. I am proposing a series of reforms to make the Council more transparent, more democratic and more accountable to the people of Tasman.
Residents have lost trust in the consultation process and the Council is failing to listen. Consultation fatigue has set in and even if residents engage with Council, good ideas are often ignored.
Questions about the Waimea Community Dam are mounting and need independent evaluation to rebuild confidence in Council’s decision-making.
Despite the Ombudsman’s clear direction to the contrary, many of TDC’s workshops and Council meetings exclude the public, sometimes using ‘commercial confidentiality’ as an excuse to avoid public scrutiny. The Mayor and Council should not be afraid of scrutiny. The Council organisation must be accountable to elected members, who in turn must be accountable to the public. Too often this relationship appears to be inverted.
The Code of Conduct system is well-meaning but rather than improving relationships on Council it has become a source of division and resentfulness. Codes of Conduct tend to be hijacked by political actors and become weaponised. They have led to Councillors and members of our Community Boards being worried about being subject to complaints for engaging passionately on issues or taking matters to the public.
The system needs reform. The Council needs to rebuild public trust. This will require a culture change led by the Mayor and genuine engagement with the community.
I propose to
- Genuinely engage with the public on major decisions. End the culture of poor consultations and rushed Council decisions. Information must be made available to Councillors with reasonable time and in an assimilable format to consider it before making a decision. Where requested by the Mayor or Council, the Council organisation should obtain contestable advice. Focus consultation efforts on the important issues: residents’ concerns and objectives, rather than ‘flooding the zone’ with meaningless but time-consuming and expensive consultations about implementation details.
- Require Community Impact Statements for all major council decision papers. These will comprise: an accurate summary of consultation listing all affected communities and stakeholders as well as their feedback; long-term costs and benefits of each option; how other Councils have dealt with similar issues; what other options were considered; cost of living impacts; impact on the Council’s relationship with mana whenua; and climate change and environmental impact.
- End exclusion of the public from Council meetings. Any public exclusions strictly limited to agenda items where confidentiality is legally required or needed to protect the Council’s negotiating position.
- Require all papers used to inform council recommendations and decisions to be made public within 30 days. Papers may be withheld or redacted only under the provisions of the LGOIMA.
- Replace the Code of Conduct with a fairer template code that better balances the interests of all parties involved.
- Ensure the Council is delivering to a clear set of priorities by developing an actionable priority list (aligned with the Long-Term Plan) that is tied to the Chief Executive’s performance indicators.
- Require Council officers to provide Councillors with all financial information relevant to the decisions they are being asked to make, including how it fits into the Council’s financial strategy, within a reasonable time in advance of the vote.
- Reassess delegated authorities to make sure that, as much as practically possible, important decisions are made by elected members rather than Council staff.
- Give Councillors the ability to test the Council’s legal advice through a $50,000 per annum contestable legal advice fund.
- Independent evaluation of the process that lead to the building of the Waimea Community Dam to learn from the past, to reconfirm if all parties acted in “good faith” and to make sure that such mistakes will never happen again.