Residents boycott consultation saying outcomes ‘pre-determined’
Allegations of lip-service have sparked a residents’ association to boycott consultation with the Wellington City Council as tensions peak between bureaucrats and the communities they serve.
“Wadestown Residents’ Association will not promote or attend any further LTP [longterm plan] meetings now or in future as we believe that most aspects of the LTP consultation and outcomes are already pre-determined,” association chairperson Greg Hyland wrote to the council.
A paper to the council’s audit and risk committee said in-person meetings confrontation was higher in 2023 than any other year on record – a problem echoed globally. “This is the sum of a trend that begun at the beginning of the pandemic that has not relented,” the paper says.
The LTP is the council’s 10-year plan for how it plans to make and spend money for the coming decade. The current one includes plans for rates to nearly triple. It includes how much the council will spend on fixing failing pipes, what it insures, what we do with our waste, and whether parking metres are coming to the suburbs.
Talk in the long-term plan of selling the Wadestown Community Centre is behind the stoush between the association and the council, leading to it pulling out of the consultation entirely.
It would though submit on the plan, said
Hyland, who has considered handing back a 2019 Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award he received ffor his community work. “We have to speak up so it is on record.” Residents who attended a recent online meeting with senior council staff got “political waffle” instead of answers, he said.
Ashleigh Cole, who moved her Music Box Academy from the Wadestown Community
Centre to the local school due to a lack of communication about the future of the centre, said the council had a “this is going to happen, take it” attitude.
Council chief strategy and governance officer Stephen McArthur said it was disappointing to hear of the boycott and urged members of the Wadestown community to have their say. “It is disingenuous and unhelpful to claim the outcomes are pre-determined,” McArthur said.
Decisions ultimately came back to councillors to vote on: “On many occasions over the years, elected members have listened to public feedback and then decided not to follow staff advice or proposals being consulted on.”
The council moved away from in-person meetings in favour of online, as had many other councils “to facilitate a better flow of information and ensure the health and safety of staff and the public”.
Southern/Paekawakawa ward city councillor Nureddin Abdurahman said he had specifically asked the council to provide funding and staff support to host in-person public meetings about the long-term plan but that was declined.
“Obviously, there is frustration. The community feels consultation is not given and they are not listened to.”
Wharangi/Onslow-Western ward councillor Diane Calvert said the feeling from people she was talking to about consultation was, “why bother, they never listen”.
She had tried to get council funding to hire council-run or owned halls for meetings and said she was told there was “no money”. She personally paid for a newspaper advertisement encouraging residents to submit on the long-term plan.
During the last long-term plan consultation in 2021 there was a clear sign that people wanted more money spent on pipes. “We didn’t listen,” she said.