ORC long-term plan hearings start today in Queenstown and Alexandra and continue tomorrow in Dunedin.
As is usual for the council, submitters will be heard by a panel consisting of half the councillors.
By contrast, neighbouring councils Environment Southland and Environment Canterbury both have full councils on long-term plan hearings committees.
The panel will make recommendations based on the submissions, which the full council will later vote on.
This week Cr Laws released a statement saying it was an ''anti-democratic, unrepresentative'' action.
''I have never struck such a flawed process in all my 30 years of public life.''
When contacted this week, Cr Laws said hearing and deliberating on submissions was one of the main functions councillors were elected for.
The decision to run the hearings that way was decided in a meeting last month in an 8-4 vote.
A significant amount of the regional council's work was done in the Dunstan ward, but only one councillor from that area was sitting on the panel, he said.
Cr Laws said he would attend the Alexandra and Queenstown hearings, but would ''sit in the audience'' and ''not be able to ask questions, nor be able to respond to legitimate constituent concerns''.
Cr Ella Lawton, who is on the panel, said she was also concerned only half the councillors were represented.
''I'll be certainly raising in the future that this needs to be looked at again.''
Hearings committee chairman Cr Doug Brown said the decision was made because it was difficult to get all councillors together for the full duration of the hearings.
''It was discussed that if councillors were unavailable for the full duration, that it was important each constituency was represented.''
While Cr Laws raised his preference for all councillors to be on the hearings committee at a meeting in April, he did not seek membership of that committee.
''All councillors have the opportunity to read the full submissions and make the final decision on the panel's recommendations, unless of course they identify a conflict of interest in a particular matter.''
The council could discuss the panel format in the future, he said.
