New position to tackle OIA requests

New Plymouth District Council will have a staff member dedicated to answering official information requests as part of its ongoing restructure.

The council wants to make $10 million in savings annually and is in the process of reducing the number of third tier managers from 40 to 23.

In an email on Friday, chief executive Gareth Green told staff it was proposed to reduce two further manager roles through merging the Customer Experience team with the Communications team and the Audit and Risk team with the Health, Safety and Well-being team.

As part of the proposal, the current customer experience manager would take up a new role - Local Government Official Information Act officer. “It's deemed necessary just because of the scale and number of LGOIMA / Local Government Official Information Act requests that we receive,” Green told RNZ.

“We get a large number of them and a number of them are quite intensive in terms of the amount of information and type of information that's being requested.”

Green said council wanted to be transparent and open to providing information to the community.

“Part of that is making sure we are timely in our responses and that we can proved all of that information, so having one person coordinate that and making sure the different business units are collating that to my mind is critical.

“There's been a number of instances in the past where we haven't met our statutory timeframes in terms of providing that information and so this a way of trying to overcome that and provide that service which is needed.”

The new LGOIMA position would sit within the Audit and Risk team.

The merged teams would be known as the Customer and Communications team and the Assurance team.

Staff directly impacted by the changes have until 8 March to make a submission on the proposal.