The going gets tough.
The HB Regional Council held a workshop last Wednesday to discuss areas where cost savings might be achieved.
Wow! It’s hard to imagine a topic of greater concern to ratepayers these days. Most would cheer the Councillors for bravely tackling this imperative.
But hold the applause. The workshop was closed, despite a commitment HBRC and other HB councils, bowing to pressure from the Ombudsman, made to conduct these working sessions in public.
Here’s the reason given for closing the session, as given in the meeting announcement:
Rationale for excluding the public
Excluding the public is necessary to enable free and frank discussions with the Executive Leadership Team on potential areas for cost savings, reduced levels of service or ceasing activity without creating unnecessary uncertainty for potentially affected staff and community members.
The community will have an opportunity to provide feedback on proposed service delivery changes through consultation on the 2025-26 Annual Plan.
When the Ombudsman issued his report calling for greater council transparency and accountability, including opening council workshops, he specifically noted that councillors being uncomfortable discussing difficult or controversial issues was in itself insufficient grounds for conducting those discussions in secret. In effect, he said, that’s politics … if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
One might think our Regional Councillors would have learned a lesson from their recent experience with their long term plan … the one where they decided behind closed doors to stop funding to Te Mata Park and HB Tourism, but then caved in once those decisions were made public in their proposed plan. Did that process spare anyone any angst?
No question, cutting programmes or service levels would be painful to those directly affected … and maybe even to councillors’ political careers. But testing and ‘socialising’ such possibilties from the outset might still be more prudent, in effect permitting all arguments and options and public passions to surface earlier rather than later and be addressed … and the public to better educated and treated as adults in the process.
What do you think … is there such a thing as too much ‘sunshine’ on councils’ decision making?
Hi Tom, as noted in the resolution, this was first & foremost about protecting staff from unnecessary speculation about job losses, secondly about negating unnecessary speculation from members of the public and/or ratepayers who may be affected by reduced service levels. We have made great strides at openness in response to the Ombudsman’s calls for transparency, this was an occasion where rightly the interests of those potentially affected outweighed the public interest. At the heart of this is Councilors acting in the public interest to explore all available choices to minimise the rating burden.
Nice statement Xan – but why exclude public – you could have asked for ideas from them – who knows – maybe somebody not on the Council or Council staff could actually have a great idea to save costs or similar – the people of the region aren’t completely stupid and there’s a fair few people out there with clever ideas. Open the meetings and allow general comment towards the end of each session for outside ideas/comment. We all have skin in the game don’t we?
Seems to be the norm, that the only time Councillors make promises, albeit “snowball.promises” …..regards openness & accountability is at election time!
They love to hide behind this statement: “The community will have an opportunity to provide feedback on proposed service delivery changes through consultation on the 2025-26 Annual Plan”
How many ratepayers really believe that most of the ‘community consultation’ is genuine iso of a tick box exercise. Excuses, excuses.