Council Looks For New Ways To Engage With The Public

Increased dissatisfaction with local government democracy has the Invercargill City Council reflecting on ways it can better engage with the public.

Deputy Mayor Tom Campbell spoke in the Finance and Projects Committee on Tuesday March 19 about the “awful” results from the residents’ satisfaction survey regarding the democratic process.

However, satisfaction with services such as parks and open spaces remains high at 82%, and the library 83%, whereas the democratic process was down at just 20%.

Mayor Nobby Clark said it was always “the small squeaky door” that says council just didn’t listen, when in fact it did listen, but didn’t necessarily agree.

An example of this was when they consulted about the museum on the two very different options, and more than 90% said to strengthen it and reopen as soon as possible.

“Now we’ve ended up going with a new museum, and in hindsight that was by far the best option.”

Manager of strategy and policy Rhiannon Suter said there was always going to be a significant group of people that thought that council don’t listen, and across New Zealand the trend of democratic levels were declining as well.

She also blamed the “fragmented” media landscape where there was no longer just one source that people used for their information.

Even with the Long Term Plan, which currently had 15 community engagement/workshops happening, including online, along with mail drops, they simply weren’t reaching everyone.

“There is a large chunk of the community that just don’t know what’s going on, and I just don’t know how else we get the message out,” she said.

The days of the town hall meetings were gone, Cr Campbell said, “nobody comes anymore and the numbers we are reaching are small.”

He said the community needed to understand that community consultation was not ‘tokenism,’ and sometimes they had three discussions on a topic before it went out to the public.