Live from Ashburton: Council keen to boost transparency

Nicole Mathewson Reporter from The Press

By local democracy reporter Jonathan Leask:

Extending livestreaming to more meetings is being considered by the Ashburton District Council in a bid to enhance public accessibility and transparency.

Environment Canterbury voted to make all of its briefings and workshops public by default at a council meeting in July.

The regional council is rolling out plans to have all its meetings, and some briefings and workshops, livestreamed from September.

The decision followed recommendations from the Ombudsman’s 2023 report into the way councils conduct their business.

In that report, Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier said he was pleased that the majority of councils he investigated livestream meetings as it "greatly" improved transparency.

In Ashburton, the council has been livestreaming its meetings since 2019.

Democracy and engagement group manager Toni Durham said the Ombudsman's meeting recommendations relate mostly to full council and standing committee meetings, which the council already livestreams.

“His recommendations also apply to workshops and briefings, which we don’t currently livestream, but we are considering how we make more of them publicly accessible.”

The full council meetings, audit and risk, and public hearings are livestreamed.

The six-weekly activity briefing meetings, where each department provides an update on work programmes and budgets, are considered workshops where no decisions are made and are not livestreamed.

It’s unlikely the resources are available to livestream meetings for groups such as the Biodiversity Advisory Group and the Road Safety Co-ordinating Committee, Durham said.

The Ombudsman had investigated eight councils (Ashburton was not one of them) over concerns local government was using closed-door workshops to make decisions free from public scrutiny.

The findings, published at the end of October, confirmed that some councils had been closing all workshops to the public by default.

It highlighted Local Government Act requirements that councils should conduct business in an “open, transparent, and democratically accountable manner”.

Chief executive Hamish Riach had said this was the case in Ashburton.
The Ombudsman report made 25 recommendations that the council was reviewing, Durham said.

“To give effect to many of the recommendations there will be resourcing implications which we are working through,” Durham said.