Council not entitled to withhold LGOIMA info, says Ombudsman
The Tasman District Council was not entitled to withhold information relating to invoices at Motueka Aerodrome, the Ombudsman has found.
But the council’s former chief executive, Janine Dowding, has said that while the council accepts the Ombudsman’s recommendations, she strongly disagreed with his opinion that the 40 hours needed to respond to the information request was “not substantial”.
The requester was asking for the previous 10 years of annual invoices for regular commercial users of Motueka Aerodrome.
In a letter supplied to Stuff by the council, Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier wrote that the council was not entitled to withhold information related to Motueka Aerodrome requested under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (LGOIMA).
The council was “not entitled to rely on section 17(f) in the manner it did”, he said.
Section 17(f) of the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act allows for a refusal of a request for the reason that the information requested “cannot be made available without substantial collation or research”.
Boshier noted that refusing a request in such circumstances was a “last resort”, and that the agency must consider fixing a charge, extending the maximum time limit for a response, and consider consulting with the requester to enable the request to be make in a form that would remove the need for substantial collation or research.
While there were a large number of invoices for landing charges over a 10-year period, in some years there were only 175 invoices, he wrote, and the council could consider fixing a charge.
In her letter to the Ombudsman, Dowding said the council had one dedicated staff member within the legal team who had overall management of the processing of LGOIMA requests.
However, most of the time spent responding to a request was from a subject matter expert in the wider organisation.
For instance, if council received a LGOIMA around a roading project, it was members of the community infrastructure group who needed to locate, explain and gather the “sometimes extremely technical” material.
Dowding urged Boshier to reconsider what his office considered a “substantial” amount of time, arguing that with 509 LGOIMAs received in 2023, it would not be feasible for staff to spend 40 hours responding to a single request.
“If every LGOIMA took half that amount of time, that would equate to 254 full-time weeks of work, which could never be resourced without a dramatic loss in the levels of service that the community expects from a council.”
The council had responded to 19 LGOIMA requests from this requester in 2023, she said.
Dowding wished to bring attention to the “worrying trend” of individuals using the LGOIMA process to “tie up” council resources as a method of expressing dissatisfaction.
“The council has been the receiving end of organised campaigns to disrupt service, most notably in relation to Covid vaccine pass decisions, creation of cycleways and correspondence from individuals who hold sovereign citizen or pseudo-law views,” Dowding said.
“A public statement from your office about the application of LGOIMA in these circumstances, but especially as they relate to sovereign citizens, would be useful for council.”
Tasman District Council communications officer Tim O’Connell said in 2023, the council received 510 LGOIMA requests, up from 295 in 2022.
And so far in 2024, the number of requests was almost three times that of the same period in 2023.
This ongoing and significant increase in formal LGOIMA requests was putting “considerable pressure” on the wider council, he said. O’Connell said the information to be provided in the LGOIMA request was still being collated, but the council would provide a copy once it was released.