An update from Tuesday's Meeting - Council Agenda's and Minutes Changes

There are a few things we can update you on from the meeting we had with Max Brough and Council Staff on 2^nd December.

We raised concerns with the number of items in agendas for Council meetings and the numbers of pages of reading required before meetings. Agendas for Councillors to read in the last term have gone to over 1,000 pages, which is not reasonable to expect Councillors to assimilate all the information in that size format.

We can confirm this is something that was already a concern for the newly elected officials. A decision has been made that there will be no more than 10 items on an agenda and it will be less than 500 pages long. There may be occasional exceptions to that, but the majority of the time the plan is for much shorter agendas.

This may mean there will be a need for more extraordinary council meetings to cover issues that must be addressed which can’t fit on an agenda.

We also raised the difficulty the Alliance has had trying to find out which Councillors have voted for what when looking at Council minutes, and we also raised how there is very little detail in Council minutes after the meetings. Much of what is documented in minutes now refers back to a reference number from a previous agenda – and this could go back to 2 or 3 previous agendas. If trying to search the reference number with a Council website search this mostly does not find the documents from the agendas.

When trying to find specific issues and what was discussed it is not easy to find information, and it was acknowledged that we have valid points with this.

As a start with these issues, an electronic voting system is being investigated to use in Council meetings – so that each Councillor could use an electronic format to register how they vote. There isn’t money in this year’s budget to implement new technology, but technology is being investigated now which may be able to be used from July 2026. This would be a good start.

We had a discussion about links going in to minutes which link back to the relevant details in previous agendas. This may be a possibility and will be discussed further in the new year.

These may not seem like big issues, but on the one hand we need Councillors who have enough time to read and fully understand what they are voting for. They also need enough time to explore questions they may need to ask staff with proposals that are put forward. On the other hand, part of the lack of transparency with NPDC decisions is how hard it is to find information. Being able to easily go back to previous discussions to piece together how and what decisions have been made will be a good start with more transparency.

We thought the first meeting with the 2025 triennial Council Team and the Ratepayers Alliance was a big success.

We will keep you up to date regularly as we move forward with this new way of communicating.