Waitaki District Council staff ‘close to overwhelmed’

Additional government requirements on local councils, combined with complicated local policy work led to Waitaki District Council staff getting "close to overwhelmed", a new report says.

The chief executive report to Waitaki District Council this week laid out the challenges faced by WDC staff, who had to deal with a combination of completing several "challenging" pieces of work in the final quarter of the financial year.

"This includes: concluding the long-term plan, responding to the government’s Local Water Done Well reforms, responding to and considering a significant number of other government reforms that affect local councils and our communities including RMA reform and the impact on and uncertainty for a challenging district plan review, progressing our transformation programme, and delivering our capital programme and ‘business as usual’," chief executive Alex Parmley said.

"The past year, including the last quarter, has seen the organisation, its capacity and its people stretched to being close to overwhelmed with the volume of high-priority work, while maintaining delivery to our district and communities.

"I would like to formally record my thanks for the efforts and commitment of staff and the governance team to the council and our communities over such a challenging year."

The report goes on to say that while the council’s transformation programme, aimed at changing the way council delivers and conducts its business, had resulted in "significant" improvements with "more to come", unforeseen factors around Local Water Done Well reforms, (which resulted in unexpected further work for staff after councillors reversed an initial preferred option), challenging LTP work and the additional time and resources required for the district plan, had made the change even more challenging.

However, implementation of a new customer service model "is improving access to customer services and increasing the speed of service delivery, as well as ensuring greater efficiency in use of resources", the report said.

"Transformational change of this scale can be disruptive ... Overall though, during the transformation, services have largely been maintained with minimal levels of disruption and our capital delivery rate has gone up, with the main projects - including large projects such as the Network Waitaki Sports and Events Centre, the Forrester Gallery Extension and the Kakanui Bridge replacement - being progressed successfully.

"Exceptions are within the library service, where there was temporary disruption, and within governance support, where we struggled to find the capacity to make the planned changes initially, in the context of additional and complex meetings and where as a result, the service standards dropped for a period.

"The focus on maintaining BAU across the organisation during the changes, and the fear of failure and the consequences of this, has put a lot of pressure on staff and has slowed the progress of transformation, but has not stopped it."