You would be hard pressed to find any politician who will say that more transparency is a bad idea. Candidates run campaigns on increasing transparency, current Hastings Mayor included. It’s easy to see why, promising transparency seems like a free lunch. No cost and popular with voters. 

It usually doesn’t work quite that easily after the election, with commercial sensitivity and other realities kicking in.

In that spirit, I would like to congratulate the councils of Hawke’s Bay. They livestreamed their open workshops on local government reform and amalgamation last week. This is the first workshop I’ve ever seen Hastings District Council stream. It was very interesting to see the information presented, and to hear the questions our elected members asked about something quite consequential. Good transparency and communication with the public.

This transparency success may have broader lessons for Hastings District Council. The council is currently under huge pressure for what amounts to a transparency failure.

The commercial and industrial sector is furious with HDC, as the recent revaluation of properties district-wide has seen their rates increase on average 27%, or about five times the expected rates increase of 5.9%. The worst part for the sector? They had no idea this was coming. No warning, no heads up, no courtesy call. The only communication came a couple of days before consultation on rates increases closed. Sent to the whole district, it said to take a look at the updated property values. 

Most ratepayers will not have realised the significance of this revaluation. Imagine being a commercial or industrial ratepayer. The economy is terrible, margins are razor thin, costs are going up, places are closing down. You expect the rates increase to be about 5.9%. Not great, not terrible, and you budget that for the next year. You get the revaluation letter from council, think to yourself that’s interesting, can’t imagine much has changed. Then you load up the website and see your values have gone up just a little, but your rates bill is going up 85% in some cases! 

So how is this a transparency problem? 

Well it turns out the mayor and councillors got a heads up about this issue back in February. It was understood then that commercial and industrial ratepayers would see a much bigger rise in rates. However, the council line is that the ‘certified’ revaluation data wasn’t available until a week before the public release and they didn’t want to discuss ‘uncertified’ data. Councillors had a workshop on the topic a day or two after staff got the official numbers, and then a few days later the public were told. Queue the ratepayer outrage and desperate attempts at damage control that have followed.

You can easily imagine a dozen different ways that this could have been handled better. Here is a very simple one. Council could have live-streamed the workshop where councillors were briefed about the impacts of the property revaluations. A simple media-release could have preceded it: “Councillors to be briefed on district-wide revaluations and rating impacts, commercial and industrial property owners hit hardest.” Then interested parties could have seen the headline numbers at the council briefing, seen the explanation of the process and what revaluations actually do to rates. They could have heard their elected members ask tough questions about the impacts. Media and businesses could refer back to the workshop and report on it. 

But instead the release felt like an ambush. And now we have a revolt amongst the commercial and industrial sectors, with dire warnings about tenants abandoning the city and the viability of the CBD.

BayBuzz has often reported on the low willingness amongst councils to have open workshops. This attitude changed after the Ombudsman came out swinging against council workshop practices. But open workshops held at 10am on a Wednesday as they are in Hastings, that are not livestreamed, may as well be closed. Those of us who work cannot just pop along for an hour on a random workday to observe and learn from these workshops. But plenty of us could either watch the stream or the recording.

So I would encourage our elected members to live up to their ideals around transparency and push to livestream all open workshops. The local government reform workshop was a good start and great proof of concept. There are upcoming workshops on the Long Term Plan that are just as consequential and important for the general public to understand as council reform. Things like the future of Splash Planet or pathways to finding the promised $4.8m in extra savings.

There’s a saying in politics, that transparency is very easy to promise and very hard to live up to. Here is an easy win for Hastings. They have the capability to live stream already. Press the streaming button, and let the people who pay the bills see the hard work being done.