Waipā District Council will set up its own “one stop shop” for district promotions, events and attractions due to declining numbers at the council-funded i-Sites in Cambridge and Te Awamutu.
The move to align the i-Sites’ websites with the council’s existing online channels has been revealed in an agenda item considered behind closed doors in December and released to The News after a Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act (Lgoima) request by Good Local Media.
The Service Delivery committee decided to pull the council’s annual funding from July 1. Destination Cambridge wanted $190,000 and Destination Te Awamutu $174,000. The cost to council per visitor is $6 in Cambridge – based on 23,634 visitors a year – and $11 in Te Awamutu based on 11,355 people through the door.
Sixty per cent of the Cambridge visitors are from outside the town while it is flipped in Te Awamutu where 70 per cent are locals.
Roger Gordon
Mike Pettit
Philip Coles
The decision – not supported by Cambridge councillors Roger Gordon, Mike Pettit and Philip Coles – will be the death knell for the two i-Sites unless they can attract alternative funding.
More details on why Cr Gordon did not support the paper, prepared by Customer and Community Services group manager Sally Sheedy going into public excluded, appear in the documents released to The News.
He argued in an email three days before the meeting to Governance manager Jo Gread that the item should have been held in public “for the purpose of transparency and accountability”.
Gordon was unhappy with the item’s name – Waipā i-Site Service Level Agreement Funding and Update – as it did not reflect the true intent of the meeting, he said, which was to scrap funding, effectively closing both operations.
He also said elected members had in an earlier closed door workshop on November 21 told staff they did not want to see any reduction in services.
Sally Sheedy
Jo Gread
“The withdrawal of funding… means that these services will no longer be offered,” he wrote, noting it was going against elected member advice.
But his major beef related to the way the decision was to be made.
“There are persons whose employment will be affected by this decision and yet those persons have not been considered nor involved in this discussion to withdraw the funding.”
The agenda item, released to The News after our copy deadline, was sent to the two i-Site organisations the previous day. The News understands their requests to attend last year’s meeting where council made the decision was declined, and they sought information under the Lgoima – on January 17 – more than a month after The News made its requests.
Roy Pilott
Editor Roy Pilott said given that time frame it was frustrating that the council responded to the i-Sites first.
The News also asked for background to Destination Te Awamutu’s lease on a council-owned building which the council considered under the Lgoima process and released to The News.
That reveals Destination Te Awamutu will not only lose i-Site funding but will have to renegotiate the lease on a building gifted to the community in 1980 for a Public Relations and Tourist Information Centre.
The building cannot be used for anything else while the council applies for a change of purpose under the Reserves Act.
Destination Cambridge pays rent to the Cambridge Town Hall Trust and was renegotiating that when council decided to pull its funding.
The News understands Destination Cambridge board members were unaware of the council’s move to set up its own online visitor information service. The organisation owns the cambridge.co.nz URL – but not cambridge.nz – and has invested significantly in content.
Destination Te Awamutu recently updated its teawamutu.nz URL at its cost. It is not known whether the council, which owns several strategic websites itself, would be prepared to pay for the websites.
