City Representation

Palmerston North City Council issued this press release:

The Local Government Commission will decide on the sort of representation Palmerston North will have at next year’s local authority elections when it holds a one day hearing in the city next week. The commission will hear submissions, appeals and objections to the decision the City Council made earlier this year when it supported city wide voting, a community ward for Ashhurst but decided to retain the number of Councillors at 15.

In all 30 people have lodged objections to the Council’s decision and these will be heard at the Seminar Room, Te Manawa from 10-4.30pm on Thursday, September 28.

The Council’s Legal Adviser, John Annabell, says the three commissioners intend to make their decision, which is binding on the City Council, before the end of the year. PNCC

For those who followed the representation review, you will be aware that council put out a proposal for consultation that included a change to city-wide voting (instead of electing councillors just per ward) and for a reduction in the number of councillors. The way the process works is this - the proposal goes out to the public (this process is governed by law) and council then hears submissions and makes its decision based on the feedback it gets through the consultation and submission process. Under the Act, there can essentially be only two outcomes from that process.
1. If a council does not modify the proposal that went out for community consultation, the proposal then comes into effect for the next local body election and appeals are limited to only the original submitters.
2. If a council does choose to modify the original proposal, then anyone can appeal. This includes the original submitters, people who did not previously make a submission, and, if they wish to, councillors.

The situation we had in Palmerston North was this - the proposal went out and received overwhelming support. However, while there was majority support for the proposal when it was written, some councillors later changed their minds. When the representation review proposal came to the council meeting of 29th May for a decision an error of judgement was made and Cr John Hornblow was prevented from voting. The basis of that erroneous decision was that Cr Hornblow, despite reading all submissions and being in attendance at the council meeting, had not attended the submission hearings on 22nd May and it was therefore decided that he would not be entitled to vote. As you can probably imagine, this caused a great deal of controversy on the night!

Council minutes of 29th May record:

On the motion that clause .2 above be adopted a division was called and,
The Mayor (Heather Tanguay) and Councillors Peter Claridge, Marilyn Craig, Ian Cruden, Phil Etheridge, Lew Findlay and Pat Kelly voted in support of the motion,
and Councillors Adrian Broad, Gordon Cruden, Vaughan Dennison, Jim Jefferies, Jono Naylor, Lynne Pope and Alison Wall voted in opposition.
Councillor John Hornblow was disqualified from voting, as he was not present at the preceding Council meeting on 22 May 2006 which considered this matter.
Councillor Anne Podd was absent from the meeting.

The Chairperson announced voting on the motion tied 7 votes to 7, and using her casting vote declared the motion carried.PNCC Council Minutes

Council’s unwritten procedure over the use of the casting vote is that it is cast in support of the status quo. On this occasion, it was not and the Mayor’s casting vote resulted in the previously consulted on proposal being overturned.

This move was surprising for two reasons. Firstly, the proposed changes to the city’s representation had been agreed by council following workshops, briefings and meetings. Had the Mayor or any councillor not wanted the number of councillors to be reduced, we had months to work through this before we wrote the proposal. With representation reviews, we are constrained by Review of Representation Arrangements which are proscribed by law. Unlike the LTCCP or other council procedures, the review is not a draft document that goes out for consultation before a final decision is made by council, it is a council decision that goes forward as a proposal. If council gets the proposal wrong and consultation does not support it, the proposal is then changed and the whole process becomes open for appeal to the Local Government Commission. The LGC then makes the decision for the city and this decision is binding. They do not have to consider council’s original proposal and can come up with something very different.

In my opinion, as the council elected to represent the city, it was our duty to get the proposal right and it was up to us to ensure that decisions that affect our local community are made by our community, not by a group of commissioners from outside our city. To this day, I have no idea why the Mayor and some councillors changed their position, or why they ignored the consultation and submissions put forward at the hearing. However, it happened. The one good thing is that representation review consultation, which in this case was ignored by council on a casting vote, cannot be discounted. On 28th September, the Local Government Commission will hear the submissions that we heard. It will be interesting to see what their decision is.