Some great news. The Voice of New Plymouth Ratepayers is going to be heard.

Some great news. The Voice of New Plymouth Ratepayers is going to be heard.

Last Tuesday we met with the new NPDC Mayor, Max Brough, and 2 of the NPDC team, to talk through how the Ratepayers Alliance can work more openly with the Council.

We would like an amicable relationship going forward where information is more readily available to share with Ratepayers. We would also like to share good news, things many Ratepayers are wanting to hear, now there has been a change of elected officials.

We did a presentation about our communication channels and how many people we are communicating with, and the number of people we reach, especially when we have big stories to tell which affect Ratepayers and the whole Community.

Before the election we put out big stories which were of concern to many people. Between Facebook and our website blog – just through our own channels – we were regularly reaching 38,000 plus people. These stories also went further afield through other social media channels.

For the year before the election, we actively changed the “age groups” following the Alliance. We started with 46% of our support from people over 65, who stayed with us as we quadrupled our supporters, and they were a very important group for us as we knew they would definitely vote.

But we also ran campaigns that reached different groups of people, men and women equally, and we shifted our supporters across all ages 35 plus, to equal proportions of supporters across all of those age groups.

That breakdown by age of supporters has continued since the election. A lot more people are interested in what is happening at the NPDC.

We met as a team after the election to work out what the Alliance had to offer for Ratepayers going forward. We thought we could offer value in these ways:

Advocate – Make Council aware of Ratepayers concerns and participate in a resolution of issues.

Educate – Explain to our supporters why things happen the way they do at Council, and report on issues.

Communicate – Keep our supporters informed about Council activities. Our supporters do not want surprises with what is happening at the NPDC, they want to know in advance what is happening, and why, and they want input before decisions are made. They also like good news when it’s available.

Last month our team set the first priorities we would like to work on with the NPDC.

This is a short summary of what we asked for on Tuesday:

1. Significant changes in how the NPDC communicates with ratepayers and the general community.

- Be able to confirm facts around things we hear

- Be involved with a “ratepayers” voice at the beginning of all new initiatives to have input and contribute ideas

- For significant changes to be made to the number of items on a Council agenda and improvements made to information in minutes after Council meetings

2. Regular updates on actions the NPDC are taking to keep rates increases down and to reduce new levels of debt.  

- What steps and actions the NPDC are taking to deliver changes in this area.

3. Transparency with everything the NPDC is actually working on.

- An ongoing, updated list of all the projects and initiatives the NPDC are working on.

In principle this was all agreed to at Tuesday’s meeting.

We were very pleasantly surprised with the willingness to engage with Ratepayers. Some of this is fairly easy to do early on, some of it will need to be worked through with how to make it happen.

Also discussed was the Local Government changes that are coming in 2027, which will need a lot of planning on what the future will look like for the Taranaki Region. (We will be posting the link to the government consultation papers around this in the next few weeks). As Ratepayers, we will be given the chance to be involved with the NPDC – openly and right from the start – with our thoughts on what is important for our region from 2027.

It’s only a few weeks until Xmas, so these priorities will be officially confirmed and start to be introduced from January next year.

One of the things we discussed with the Council was that for us to truly represent the voice of Ratepayers we will be actively engaging with ratepayers to ask for opinions and ideas. We purchased technology to help with this for the election, and in the new year we will work through the structure of how we will gather information.

We have been given an amazing opportunity to truly have ratepayers views heard – right at the start of NPDC discussions on anything new – and when we need to clarify information.

The big voice of Ratepayers – who turned up and voted and got heavily involved with the 2025 election – have made an enormous difference for Democracy in New Plymouth.

Well done to everyone who got involved and made this happen, we are thrilled with the outcome.