Council poll result ‘awful’

Just 20% of respondents were satisfied with the city council’s democratic processes

The Invercargill City Council is again getting “awful” feedback about how well it consults with residents.

Councillors and staff now face a task to figure out how to improve the council’s messaging – and potentially, the survey process itself. The council polls residents through an online survey four times a year and the results from the December quarter show a familiar result: just 20% of 522 respondents said they were satisfied with the council’s democratic processes.

Deputy mayor Tom Campbell told councillors at a committee meeting on Tuesday that they could not merely receive what has become entrenched negative feedback.

“I know we have seen these results before, but they’re awful, aren’t they?” he said.

The feedback was that the council had already made its mind up before consultations, and that the exercise was just tokenism. “We know that isn’t actually true,” Campbell said, “but I can see how the public would think that.’’

He suggested more “real time” consultations rather than the present practice, which involved the council first holding a series of its own discussions and workshop meetings to gather information and debate it before going to the public.

The council’s strategy and policy manager, Rhiannon Suter, said councils nationwide were dealing with the challenges of a fragmented media landscape in which there was no single way to reach all parts of the public.

The Invercargill council had switched from phone to online surveys because so few households now had landlines.

Mayor Nobby Clark said the council should reconsider how its key performance indicators were set for assessing democratic delivery and questioned how representative the results of the surveys were, given that the number of respondents was sometimes small.

“I don’t think we’re failing,” he said in reference to democratic delivery.

It was difficult at times to balance what the council was hearing formally through consultation with “what we hear through other mechanisms, which can be quite extensive”, he said.

The other council service to receive strongly negative results was the transitional art and museum space He Waka Tuia, with 24% satisfaction. However, council mana whenua representative Evelyn Cook noted many of the critical comments were from people who also acknowledged in the survey that they had not gone to He Waka Tuia.

Suter said an example of the complexity of such issues was that the art museum’s visitation numbers were good compared with the separate results of the satisfaction survey.