The "Stickyness" of Local Government Systems

I went to a meeting recently where council staff, who have not been in their jobs for very long, told us all that all we needed to do was make submissions to the Council so that we could get our issues addressed.  They didn't have a whole lot to say when a number of people noted that they had been making submissions for years and they seldom get local issues addressed! It's even worse when the Council realises that the community were right 10 years later and as a result, fixing the problem has become a lot more expensive.  I've seen the same thing over a number of years, and forums and it begins to seem like putting the focus on submissions is a way of distracting energy away from the places where the real decisions are made!

I'm intrigued at how a system with some pretty good and well meaning people in it can be so impervious to efforts to change it!  Its also interesting that players in many different parts of the system are frustrated - councillors, community board members, advocates, businesses, and council staff.  Part of the problem seems to be the environment in which local government in New Zealand operates.  They are governed by legislation which limits what they can do.

Furthermore, in Christchurch at the current time, we are operating in some unusual conditions in which our national level government has chosen to remove or undermine both out City Council and our Regional Council.  Part of this is due to being in a disaster recovery environment, and part of it came before the earthquakes struck when elected members of the Regional Council were sacked and replaced with Government appointed commissioners.

All this makes it entirely difficult to work with local government.  Instead it seems that we might be better to start trying to work with other important players in the system - local businesses, for example.  A difficult thing given the nebulous nature of the the business world - even more nebulous that the world of local government!

Reflecting on the last year

Its been a busy year and is now perhaps time to get this blog up and going again. Where are we at in Christchurch?
Well, there were more traumatic earthquakes during the last year but they are getting less frequent and, it seems, smaller. The Central City is much worse than it was back in March last year because many buildings that looked ok back then have been demolished. Our national government has gone against all advice from international best practice in disaster recovery and set up a new Government body (CERA) which is overseeing the "recovery". I put recovering in ""s since at this stage it seems to largely mean the demolition of our City and the undermining of our Council. As Bronwyn Hayward suggested in a press article it might have been a lot more sensible to spend the money on supporting the Council and its staff rather than coming in and undermining them and lessening their capacity to act.

At this stage over a year since the devastating Feb 22 earthquake, we have demolished approximately half of the buildings that have been lined up for demolition which means we are not going to have a central City for some years to come, and if any of the new buildings that have been put up are anything to go by, Christchurch is going to distinguish itself by being the ugliest city imaginable! Still, some good things have also come out of this disaster and I"ll talk about them in my next blog post.