Printed from https://fyi.org.nz/request/21353-proposed-district-plan-seeks-summary-of-submissions-by-submitter-in-an-alternative-format-to-pdf on April 19, 2024 17:01

Proposed District Plan - seeks Summary of Submissions by Submitter in an alternative format to PDF

Thorndon Residents' Association made this Official Information request to Wellington City Council

The request was successful.

From: Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear Wellington City Council,

Please provide the Association with a copy of WCC's 'Summary of Submissions by Submitter' on the proposed District Plan in a file format other than the 58.6MB PDF (comprising 2071 pages).
WCC webpage, November 2022:
https://wellington.govt.nz/your-council/...

Under section 15 of the LGOIMA, the Association's format preference, conveyed through the Friend of Submitters, was to receive this information in CSV format, or other tabular format, to facilitate efficient analysis of the submissions.

Under section 15(3)(b), the Association also requests that if the Council declines to provide the information in the Association's preferred format, that WCC provides the Association with the grounds in support of its reasons for not doing so.

The Association is happy to discuss any and all issues around this request with council officers, including what data and file formats the council’s information management system can output the summary of submissions into, besides a PDF. In any case, please provide a list of all the other data and file format options that are currently available to the WCC for the distribution of these data to the public.

Yours faithfully,

Thorndon Residents' Association

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From: Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear Wellington City Council,

Following up on our request for information of 6 December 2022, the Association requests, under section 10(3) of the LGOIMA, that its 6 December request for information is responded to urgently, and preferably before Christmas.

The Association’s reason for requesting the information be provided urgently is to enable it to analyse the submissions and prepare itself for the hearings on the proposed District Plan that we have been informed will commence in February 2023. This reason for seeking an urgent response aligns with the section 4(a)(i) public participation purpose of the LGOIMA, which states that

“4. The purposes of this Act are—

(a) to increase progressively the availability to the public of official information held by local authorities, and to promote the open and public transaction of business at meetings of local authorities, in order—
(i) to enable more effective participation by the public in the actions and decisions of local authorities; and
(ii) ...—
and thereby to enhance respect for the law and to promote good local government in New Zealand"

The Association is confident that the Council will want "to promote good local government” and that it will be able to comply with this request for the information to be provided before Christmas, not least because that would also be consistent with the duty under section 13(1) to make and communicate its decision on the request “as soon as reasonably practicable”. We believe the information requested can exported from the database used by the Council to store and analyse the submissions for its own purposes relatively simply, and since the Council has already released the information in another format, no lengthy decision making process is required to consider whether any information should be withheld.

If the Council does not respond urgently to the Association’s request for information until the end of January, it will be significantly impeding and disadvantaging the Association’s ability to prepare for the hearings.

Yours sincerely,

Thorndon Residents' Association

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From: BUS: Assurance
Wellington City Council

Tçnâ koe

Thank you for your email submitted via FYI dated 6 December 2022 requesting with a copy of WCC's 'Summary of Submissions by Submitter' on the proposed District Plan in a file format other than the 58.6MB PDF (comprising 2071 pages).

Our team will manage your request under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 which requires us to provide a decision as soon as possible, but no later than 25 January 2023, being 20 working days from receipt.

Please note that this working day calculation takes into account the Christmas close down period of 20 December – 10 January, as a result the timeframe for responding to LGOIMA’s is slightly longer than usual.

I note that you have requested this information with urgency, we will work with the relevant teams to get this information to you as soon as possible and will advise if we are not able to get this to you before Christmas.

The reference number for your request is IRC-4217

Please contact us if you have any further questions.

Kind regards

The Assurance Team
Email: [email address]
Wellington City Council | W Wellington.govt.nz | |

The information contained in this email is privileged and confidential and intended for the addressee only.
If you are not the intended recipient, you are asked to respect that confidentiality and not disclose, copy or make use of its contents.
If received in error you are asked to destroy this email and contact the sender immediately. Your assistance is appreciated.

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From: Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear WCC Assurance Team,

1. Thank you for acknowledging the Association's request, but in particular acknowledging the request for urgency.

2. Is WCC's Chief Executive aware of all the reasons for the request for urgency?

3. Why is the information in today's email from WCC's Assurance Team considered privileged, confidential, etc?

The Association would like to respectfully alert the Assurance Team that the same request was made weeks ago, indeed twice via different channels. It would seem that these were not identified as justifiable official information requests (?). These requests were conveyed by a WCC commissioned agent, and then an officer of the Corporation, and were discussed within the organisation during a public consultation process. Those approaches were for the SAME official information. There is concern that much time has been squandered already.

Yours sincerely,

Thorndon Residents' Association

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From: BUS: Assurance
Wellington City Council

Tēnā koe

 

Thank you for your email.

 

Official Information requests, alongside Privacy Act requests, are managed
by the Council’s Assurance team for investigation and response, as
delegated by the Council’s Chief Executive. More information regarding
this can be found [1]here. When responding to requests where the requestor
has expressed haste, we apply urgency according to the Ombudsman guidance.

 

The information you mention in our response to your request dated 8
December 2022 is a standard email disclaimer stamp which is on all our
emails.

 

Please be assured we are working with the relevant teams to get this
information to you as soon as possible and will advise if we are not able
to get this to you before Christmas.

 

Kind regards

 

The Assurance Team

Email: [2][email address]

Wellington City Council | W Wellington.govt.nz |  | 

 

The information contained in this email is privileged and confidential and
intended for the addressee only.

If you are not the intended recipient, you are asked to respect that
confidentiality and not disclose, copy or make use of its contents.

If received in error you are asked to destroy this email and contact the
sender immediately. Your assistance is appreciated.

 

 

 

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From: BUS: Assurance
Wellington City Council

Attachment SubmitterspreadsheetcopyDistrictPlan2022.xlsx
2.5M Download View as HTML

Attachment summary by provision final 22 11 22.csv
7.9M Download

Tçnâ koe

Thank you for your patience.

Please find attached the information captured in the PDF document "Summary of Submissions by Submitter" relating to the proposed District Plan found on the Councils webpage, in an excel spreadsheet format to allow for efficient analysis.

We note the spreadsheets are quite large, if you have any difficulties in receiving/opening them, please let us know and we can look to provide this information via an alternative method.

Kind regards

The Assurance Team
Email: [email address]
Wellington City Council | W Wellington.govt.nz | |

The information contained in this email is privileged and confidential and intended for the addressee only.
If you are not the intended recipient, you are asked to respect that confidentiality and not disclose, copy or make use of its contents.
If received in error you are asked to destroy this email and contact the sender immediately. Your assistance is appreciated.
The information contained in this email is privileged and confidential and intended for the addressee only.
If you are not the intended recipient, you are asked to respect that confidentiality and not disclose, copy or make use of its contents.
If received in error you are asked to destroy this email and contact the sender immediately. Your assistance is appreciated.

show quoted sections

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From: Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear BUS: Assurance,

The Association is appreciative of the timely response comprising a .xlsx format file and a .csv format file.

We draw your attention to a part of our original information request that has not yet been addressed:

'... please provide a list of all the other data and file format options that are currently available to the WCC for the distribution of these data to the public.'

The intent is to discover ALL the digital formats WCC could have supplied these data in.

Yours sincerely,

Thorndon Residents' Association

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From: BUS: Assurance
Wellington City Council

Kia ora,

The format of the information held is originally in Excel, which is them processed into a .pdf document for the purpose of posting to the Councils website.

Thanks to the work of Council officers in response to your request, along with recommendations from a member of the open data community, the Council now has a workflow to convert this, and future information, in a .csv format.

Other commonly used formats in the Councils Strategic Planning Team for tabular data is .dbf; however, this is predominantly used in spatial workflows and this data has not been converted into this format.

There are a number of other formats that Excel, or Feature Manipulation Engine (FME) can output data into (these are the two common software systems we use for tabular data), however without established workflows it can take some time to figure out how to convert reliably.

Kind regards.

The Assurance Team
Email: [email address]
Wellington City Council | W Wellington.govt.nz |

The information contained in this email is privileged and confidential and intended for the addressee only.
If you are not the intended recipient, you are asked to respect that confidentiality and not disclose, copy or make use of its contents.
If received in error you are asked to destroy this email and contact the sender immediately. Your assistance is appreciated.

show quoted sections

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Things to do with this request

Anyone:
Wellington City Council only: