Dear Wellington City Council,

The Association, along with others in the community, struggles to understand some of the selected statistics from the 1084 responses reported on this webpage:
https://www.transportprojects.org.nz/cur...

It is understood that the data for these stats have been driven by individuals answering an online WCC questionnaire, or a paper version of it.

Findings that puzzling, for example, include:
That 35% of submitters 'normally travel around' by bicycle in the Thorndon Connections area.
That 32% of submitters 'normally travel around' by Car/Van.
Yet 9,000 vehicles per day and ~100 cyclists use Molesworth & Mulgrave Streets.
Therefore the findings derived from the submissions mystify; could they be skewed somehow?

In order that anyone may independently scrutinize, audit or verify the computations being made from the data supplied by submitters:

1) Please provide a spreadsheet comprising EVERY element of raw data collected by WCC, every field, every comment, etc, that underpins the 1084 responses reported as received by WCC.

2) Please provide a separate spreadsheet recording EVERY element of raw data (comments et al, etc) collected via the Thorndon Community Group's submission form, as separately submitted to WCC, whether paper or digital.
(Background: an extension of one week was granted by WCC for the community to continue to submit on the complex Thorndon Connections proposals in Traffic Resolution 63-23)

3) All metadata for each data field (to ensure there's no ambiguity in interpreting what each element means, is intended to measure, etc)

4) Please provide a digital copy of WCC's questionnaire

5) Please provide a digital copy of the Thorndon Community's questionnaire

6) Please identify any submissions that were appraised as 'invalid' (thus not counted), and the reason for each such decision

7) In the spreadsheets please ensure each data row includes 'location' i.e. a suburb or town or postcode (etc) that each submitter identified with

8) Please advise when ALL these data will be readily accessible from WCC's website.

Yours faithfully,

Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear BUS: Assurance,

Thank you for your letter of 26 April.

Consistent with the Association's original request we seek all the data that you can supply from all the submissions received on the Thorndon Connections project, only leaving out fields that would violate privacy.

Please provide the result in a spreadsheet format.

The Association does not anticipate any costs for this request to be fulfilled, as this is digital data (it must be to be in a report), and the data fields that can be supplied should be able to be readily transformed into a spreadsheet.

The expectation is that individuals' names and their email addresses would be the only data excluded.

Yours sincerely,

Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear BUS: Assurance,
Attn. Claudia Holgate

Please acknowledge that data
- clearly exists
- has not been delivered within statutory time limits, and
- has not been supplied in a form preferred by the Association.

1) The Association would welcome an explanation.

2) PREFERRED FORM
Please make the information available in the way preferred by the Association.
Spreadsheet form was specified in the Association's original information request on 5 April.

The Association notes that it has encountered this barrier previously e.g. WCC reference IRC-4217 (2022).
https://fyi.org.nz/request/21353-propose...

Accordingly, there is heightened concern that this not only seems to offend Council's internal policies on open data, but also constitutes a breach of the Association's rights outlined in LGOIMA 1987 s15(2).

3) URGENCY
Please treat this information request as URGENT.
The subject matter is of great public interest.
Time is of the essence as these matters will be subject to Council regulatory decision-making later this week.

By not supplying the information in the form originally requested, but rather suggesting that the Association review some other 'unfriendly' format, this has effectively wasted two productive days for the Association. That's an entire weekend for volunteers to receive the data, and to use it.
The Association needs the data in the format requested please.

4) GRIEVANCE
The Association is aggrieved that WCC could not expedite this information request sooner.

Additionally, it requests that in future WCC publishes all DATA in a form(s) that can be easily discovered and easily scrutinized without needing to invoke an information request i.e. stop locking data into PDF's. Perhaps, supplement the PDF's with relevant data in forms such as spreadsheets.

Yours sincerely,

Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear BUS: Assurance, Attention Claudia Holgate, Senior Advisor, Official Information

Thank you for your letter of 11 May 2023

You advise:
'... we are unable to review all the data in the free text section and apply redactions to this within the timeframe you have specified. We have therefore removed this section in its entirety to remove the risk of personal information being revealed ...'

The Association is dissapointed to discover from WCC, at this late date, that the data could not be provided within the statutory timeframe (20 days).

The Association requests that ALL of the data be provided please, in the format requested (spreadsheet) and especially including the comments (free text).

Yours sincerely,

Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear BUS: Assurance,

Please provide all the data requested.

Yours sincerely,

Thorndon Residents' Association

Dear BUS: Assurance,

Please recognise the obligation regarding the Association's preference for receiving information in a particular format.

Under section 15 of the LGOIMA, the Association's preferred format for receiving this information is XLSX (otherwise CSV would suffice).

This format preference is consistent with other information requests made by the Association, and were fulfilled.

Yours sincerely,

Thorndon Residents' Association