The “Urban Legend” of Transparency for Ratepayers and Renters from the NPDC

We have recently added a new section to our website called the Election Section 2025.

Creating the new website pages started many months ago as an Alliance team. We wanted to show the New Plymouth Community how the Mayor and Councillors had voted, so people could see who had made what decisions over the last term.

We set out with a list of big projects the elected officials had voted to undertake. We intended to prepare a list for each person who votes on Council and let people know what decisions they had made over the 3 years.

We have to say what a shambles the minutes of meetings are at the NPDC and what a shambles an LGOIMA is when they refer the author back to minutes from a meeting.

An ordinary person having a look at past minutes from an NPDC meeting would probably expect:

• The topic that was discussed would be listed,
• A summary of discussions would be in the minutes,
• A vote took place – and who voted for and against would be listed

We are talking about projects with multi-million dollar spends.

The minutes look nothing like this.

The minutes refer back to the original agenda – an entirely different document. There may be a topic heading in the minutes, but the agenda needs to be referred to, to see any detail of what the councillors may have been discussing.

Agendas are hundreds of pages long. Trying to find any detail of what may have been discussed in any particular meeting needs 2 documents open and piecing together fragments of information.

The only place in the minutes where a for or against vote is recorded is when something called a “division” is called by one or more Councillors. This doesn’t happen that often in Council meetings. When a “division” is called there is a record of who voted for the motion and who voted against – but the topic they voted about needs to be found in the original agenda for “this” meeting to see what they may have voted on.

Frankly, as a team of concerned people trying to understand what it is our Council has done over the last 3 years, it has been an absolute nightmare.

So, our original plan changed from displaying how Councillors and the Mayor had voted on a selection of big projects, to how they voted on a sample of projects we could actually find any mention of votes about, either in minutes, or from answers to our LGOIMA questions.

It was virtually impossible to see a record for each individual Elected Official and what they had supported and what they were against in the last term they have represented their community.

We strongly believe this needs to change when the next set of Mayor and Counillors are elected in October this year.

But this is why we say the term “Transparency” at the NPDC is an Urban Legend.:

“An urban legend is a modern form of folklore, often consisting of fictional stories that are spread by word of mouth and believed to be true, despite lacking evidence”

So often you hear the NPDC officials tell you how Transparent they are - spreading by word of mouth that fictional story.