Secret council meetings follow best practice, mayor says

Wednesday, 15 November 2023

Wellington mayor Tory Whanau says the council’s processes for secret meetings and workshops already align with best practice, even though meetings held in secret were sometimes necessary.

A report released last month by Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier made several recommendations for councils to improve openness, noting that “even a perception of secrecy can be damaging, as secrecy breeds suspicion”.

In Wellington, a public-excluded meeting was at the centre of an investigation into leaked information about a deal between the council and Reading Cinemas. If nothing had been leaked, the public would still be unaware the deal was in progress.

Boshier’s report noted that more public meetings could improve public trust and decrease misinformation. “People may not always agree with council’s decisions but a transparent process allows them to understand a council’s reasoning, and can mitigate any suspicions of impropriety in the decision-making process.”

Whanau said the council’s current practice was in line with the Ombudsman’s recommendations.

She strongly supported transparency as “a pillar of democracy”, but it was sometimes necessary to hold meetings and workshops in secret, for example to protect commercial information or personal details.

The council’s chief strategy and governance officer Stephen McArthur pointed to the council’s YouTube channel, which contained videos of meetings and some workshops, as an example of how the council complied with the report.

Councillor Iona Pannett, who was instrumental in opening some of Wellington’s workshops to the public last term, did not agree that the council was complying with all of Boshier’s recommendations. She would write to the chief executive to draw attention to the recommendations, she said.

“I think there are some very valuable insights in the report and a lot of scope to improve. It’s not a criticism, but a look at how we can improve.”

Workshops, even though they were not official meetings, could be used to narrow down options, Pannett said.

Several of the city council’s practices were among those criticised by Boshier.

While the council did publicly notify open workshops and video record them, it did not notify public-excluded workshops or provide reasons why they needed to be held in secret.

“It is equally important that closed workshops and their subject matter are publicised, along with a suitably detailed reason for closing them,” Boshier wrote in his report.

When the council closes its formal meetings to the public, it repeats the wording of the legislation verbatim, with no further detail – a practice criticised in the review.

Councils needed to explain in detail why there was a reason to exclude the public and why that was more significant than the public interest in the meeting, Boshier found.

“When the evidence of thoughtful application of exclusion rationale is so starkly absent from the resolution itself, the public may well wonder how robust the determinations were.”

The council should also provide more detail about the subject of meetings, even when the public was excluded. The general subject matter listed should give “a clear sense of the matter being discussed”, Boshier wrote.

In the past the council has used vague terms – the Reading Cinemas deal was titled “City Activation project” while the purchase of car parks was titled “City Car Parking Capacity and Revenue”.

Councillor Tim Brown said that coming from a commercial background, transparency requirements were a “bit of a shock”, with only a “tiny amount” of the council’s activity could happen behind closed doors.

He said there was an “enormous amount of contention” from councillors whenever staff recommended information should be kept secret.

Diane Calvert, who has been sounding the alarm about the dire financial situation facing the council, said financial information which councillors had discussed in workshops this year was still being withheld from the public.

“Having members of the public commit their own funds to work out what makes up the council’s looming financial crisis, because the council won’t release information, is not in the spirit of the Ombudsman recommendations.”