​ ​ ​ ​ ​
Contact

Search

Significance and engagement policy

Council is committed to making informed and sustainable decisions in the best interests of our communities. We want to ensure the decisions we make made reflect the aspirations of tangata whenua, residents, ratepayers, community groups and business. To help us to make the best decisions, we engage with our communities daily using a number of tools. Sometimes, this is simply to provide information, and other times we seek input into our decision-making processes.

In line with legislative requirements under the Local Government Act 2002 (the LGA), Council has a Significance and Engagement Policy that helps us identify how and when our communities can expect to be engaged or consulted on decisions about issues, proposals, assets and activities. The current policy was adopted in 2014 and is now being reviewed.

The Significance and Engagement Policy enables us (as Council) and our communities to understand the significance that we place on certain issues, proposals, assets, decisions, and activities. It also explains how and when the community can expect to be engaged in, or specifically consulted on, decisions about issues, proposals, assets, decisions and activities.

What changes are we proposing to the policy?

Across the entire policy, we are making changes to refine and simplify the existing text. This will strengthen the policy as a whole, as well as make it user-friendly and easier to understand.

The full text of the draft policy can be found in Appendix Two, but below is a summary of the main proposed changes.

We have included a background section to the policy to set out Council’s commitment to inclusive localism and introduced the tool we will be using to guide our engagement towards achieving it.

Our engagement will be in line with the provisions of the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) spectrum. IAP2’s Spectrum of Public Participation has been designed to assist with identifying the appropriate level of participation to complement the public’s role in any public participation process. The Spectrum is used widely both internationally and within New Zealand, and it is found in the public participation plans of many other councils.

This proposal represents a departure from our current binary approach in which any decision to engage is guided by the flow chart process in schedule two of the current policy. Rather the new approach better reflects the fact that engagement is along a spectrum and sometimes engagement might simply be about providing an update to the community or stakeholders and other times it may be a more involved and detailed process.

The main update in the significance section of the draft policy is about the assessment of significance. We are proposing to introduce criteria to help clarify the determination of significance. This assessment is along a continuum flowing from none through to high, with illustrative examples.

We also want to clarify that where a number of proposals or decisions are to be taken together, as part of a project for instance, significance should be assessed on the cumulative impact of the whole package.

Council has long committed itself to engaging with Māori, and this approach is evident in the work we do and how we do it. Under the engagement section of the draft policy, we are proposing to introduce a new subsection that details out this commitment and how we give effect to it. The proposed change simply puts into writing the ethos that already underpins the work Council does with tangata whenua.

We are also proposing to introduce some guidance around Council’s methods of engagement in the policy. These have been set out in table form to help show how the nature of a matter under consideration will determine how we make decisions on it and also guide how we will go about communicating and/or engaging with the community.

Table 2 in the draft policy illustrates the various of engagement in the IAP2 Spectrum that may accompany a matter; while Table 3 shows the correlation between project planning and engagement and examples of what forms of engagement may occur at the different stages of a project cycle.

Strategic assets, as defined under the Local Government Act 2002, are assets or groups of assets that the council needs to continue to own in order to achieve outcomes that are important to the current or future well-being of the community.

We are proposing to modify the list of strategic assets in accordance with the following key principles:

  • assets which are not used for the delivery of services are not considered strategic,
  • identifying assets as groups or networks to better reflect the way in which they deliver services and enable us to respond to changing needs.

In line with these principles, our list of identified strategic assets better reflects their importance to Council’s ability to deliver services and are protected accordingly.

Share this page

Sharing...