The Alliance had our First Management Meeting with the NPDC on Thursday 12th March. We thought it went really well.

On Thursday 12^th March the Ratepayers Alliance had our very first meeting with Management from the NPDC to talk about issues that are affecting Ratepayers.

Late last year we met with the NPDC to ask for a forum where we can access people at the Council to ask questions and raise concerns.

We wanted to create an amicable meeting situation where we can ask questions to clarify information, discuss issues and work towards solutions. And we also wanted a way to ask questions in between meetings.

We also wanted to improve finding out about what is coming up that will affect Ratepayers and have an avenue to know what is happening with news from the Council.

Part of yesterday’s meeting was to clarify the logistics of how this contact will work.

We also found in this first meeting the Council team can explain how things work on their side of things, next steps that will happen and what may be involved with those. The NPDC is a very big organisation and bringing change doesn’t happen overnight, so this forum allows us to understand more about how things will progress to bring about change.

One of the things we originally asked for was a Quarterly Meeting to cover what is happening at the Council to bring down rates and debt, and what efficiencies are being worked on, so we can keep ratepayers informed.

We have received a meeting date for the next three Quarterly Meetings for this year which is a huge step forward with communication directly to Ratepayers.

We’ve also talked about what decisions are coming up that will need to be decided by the elected officials. We would like to let people know more about meetings where decisions affect the community, for people who may like a chance to have a say before decisions are made.

We discussed a few things coming in the next few months where Ratepayers will be able to have input, but we also talked about how we can improve receiving information about what work is coming up that the Council are working on. We will discuss this further.

We talked about media releases from the Council and how we can access news in a more timely way, and we covered how information is released to the public.

We talked about people being made aware of public meetings and events. A letter had been sent to “Stakeholders” about the Huatoki event in early March, but a lot of people were not aware this was on, including the Alliance. We had some discussions about the Antenno app the NPDC is using. Not everything has been on this app and not everyone knows about it, and not everyone is using Facebook. So there isn’t a one size fits all to keep people informed. We will continue to work through how to deal with this type of communication.

It had already been confirmed the Ratepayers Alliance is a Stakeholder for the Bell Block Spatial Plan. We received a letter before the meeting this week to confirm Ratepayers will have the opportunity for input in a similar way as the Bell Block Citizens’ Panel is doing. We will be working directly with Council Staff to set dates and venues for this, and then let people know how they can get involved.

We recently let people know a review was being done about Parking in the CBD. We received many comments from people who tried to use this Have Your Say document, and our own team found the same thing, that the boxes to type feedback were very short and very little information could be put on the form.

We asked in this meeting if we could work on a standard with consultations, and the Have Your Say format. We asked for at least one open field box to be included in ALL forms of feedback from the public. And we asked that these open feedback boxes allow for long feedback to be written.

We have asked if we can work on a standard where everyone who wants to have a say, can write exactly what they want, in a least one box on every consultation method.

How a standard is introduced will be looked at, and in principle this concept was accepted.

The community’s ideas for the next Long Term Plan will be coming up next month, so we are hopeful the freeflow box situation will be in place by then. A comment was made by one of the Council Team that if Ratepayers don’t want spending on nice to haves in the next LTP – this will be where they can have their say about that.

In the very first Public Engagement Committee meeting a speaker raised that one of the signs on the drive in to New Plymouth, for greeting visitors, has no English on the sign, only Te Reo. This is the sign before Mangorei Road.

Our team also recently noticed the sign by the Airport also has no English, only Te Reo, and we brought this up yesterday. This is being worked on by the Council media team, as a follow up from the Public Engagement Meeting. The signs are due to be replaced by the end of this year, but a plan will be put together to replace them earlier, and both English and Te Reo will be on future signs.

We discussed our Cycleway Safety Data Reports – and left a copy of the 3 months we have captured so far. We had discussions about how the NPDC attract people to lodge incidents to the Council and then how they report on actual “real” data from that feedback. There were discussions with a couple of possible ideas, with easier ways for people to contact the Council. These will be explored.

The difference between our January Cycleway Report for Incidents and the NPDC Report (received from our LGOIMA) will also be looked at. We had 15 Incidents in the first 25 Days of January, the NPDC only had 6 on their report. We were aware of one incident which had been phoned through to the call centre and this was not on the NPDC report for January.

It was mentioned if people walk up to the front counter at the Council with a complaint these are not recorded. There is a form people can fill out for their complaint to be captured, if anyone finds themselves in this situation.

We covered quite a bit of ground and found the meeting to be very productive.

If any of our supporters have ideas or issues they think we should bring up in these meetings on behalf of Ratepayers, please let us know.