After seeing residents’ satisfaction tumble, Tasman District Council is hoping to rebuild trust with the community it serves. 

The council’s most recent residents survey featured a sobering drop in resident satisfaction with the organisation’s overall performance which fell from 71% to just 50%. 

Respondents who thought the council had a good reputation also dropped to 50% from 69%, while those satisfied with council consultation also fell 9 percentage points to 44%. 

Communications and change manager Chris Choat told elected members on Thursday that he was “quite concerned” about the figures. 

“It inhibits our ability to have a good, positive relationship with our community.” 

He said some of the decline might be attributable to national trends, but said the council still needed to have a look at its processes to rebuild its relationship with residents. 

As a result, the council is now reviewing the policies that guide how it engages with the community with the intent to strengthen its relationship and rebuild trust with residents. 

“It’s about how we do it, and how we can do it in a different way that builds a closer relationship with our residents in an increasingly fractured, opinionated world,” Choat said. 

“We want to build, through this framework, an environment of shared ownership, shared decision-making.” 

The focus would be on improving the council’s constant, ongoing engagement with the community, rather than specifically on its consultation procedures. 

Examples of potential changes included involving residents earlier when the council develops its three-yearly plan for the next decade, improving the two-way flow of information so residents were more informed about why specific outcomes have occurred, and having greater consideration of the public sentiment seen in places like the council’s Facebook page. 

“People don't know what we do, and sit here and go, ‘Why am I paying for this?’ And that’s where our issue comes in... We want people to come along on that journey,” Choat said. 

“We are not going to get everybody agreeing with us, and we get that… when I walk out of a meeting and I hear ‘I don’t like what you’ve done, but I know why you’re doing it’, to me, that is the trust.”

Councillors were supportive of the approach to improve the council’s standing amongst the community, with Jo Ellis calling the results “pretty disappointing” and Glen Daikee saying the council had “dropped the ball a couple of times”. 

Brent Maru, who previously said he had taken the results “a bit to heart”, also highlighted that the survey results had also shown high satisfaction with the services the council delivers. 

Out of residents who used the specific council services, 94% were satisfied with libraries, 93% were satisfied with kerbside recycling, 92% were satisfied with wastewater, and while roading satisfaction was lower at 54%, that was an increase of 9 percentage points from last year.

“It tells us that our community does actually value what we do; sometimes they don’t value the way in which we go about telling them what we do,” said chief operating officer Steve Manners. 

-Local Democracy Reporting is local body journalism co-funded by RNZ and NZ On Air

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