The Waitaki Ratepayers and Residents Association has gone to the Ombudsman over what it says are secret workshops held by the council in Oamaru.
The association said in a press release it had filed a complaint with the Ombudsman yesterday over Waitaki District Council's use of secret workshops to make decisions on most important issues.
The complaint cited evidence from council officers' own written statements that show decisions were made in violation of New Zealand's open meeting law.
"With an extraordinary number of workshops, the council is certainly one of the most egregious violators of open meetings in the country," the association said in its statement.
The association said that in a response to an information request, the council provided a list of 68 workshops held in 2022, with 60 showing no grounds whatsoever for confidentiality.
The statement said following two months of protest against decision-making in secret workshops, the council papers substituted the word "discussed" for "agreed" to describe the process of gaining consent from elected members.
Only after agreement at workshops was a matter brought to a public meeting so the council could "confirm" what was previously decided.
Examination of the list of council workshops in 2022 showed a primary function of workshops was to obtain decisions — sometimes described as "feedback" — from elected members.
The statutory ban on decision-making could be guaranteed only if elected members were required to remain mute during and after staff informational presentations, something which was extremely unlikely.
Feedback can be obtained in many ways, such as concluding an informational presentation with the observation that this is what staff intended to do, and asking if elected members had any "questions or comments" on that course of action.
The association said the Ombudsman was investigating eight councils for workshop use and Waitaki District Council should be added to that list.
Former Waitaki mayor Alex Familton and five former councillors had written to the council in March raising concerns about the increasing number of workshops.
The office of the Ombudsman could not confirm yesterday a complaint had been received from the association.
Mayor Gary Kircher said he understood where the group was coming from but just the sheer amount of work that had to be done by councillors led to the use of workshops.
He said workshops were needed in some cases to understand quite detailed work and to help prepare reports which would go to council meetings.
To put the all the work done in workshops into meetings would lead to increased costs, which would have to be passed on to the ratepayer.
He said all decisions were made at council meetings.
