Mayor Weston Kirton said he wanted to thank everyone who participated in Council's community engagement over September or applied to the Empowering Communities - Enhancing Lives wellbeing fund.
“Council had an outstanding response to all the issues we were seeking feedback on which included priority areas for next year's Long Term Plan, and consultation proposals for the Smoke and Vape Free Policy and reducing speed limits in school zones.
We also had a fantastic response to our one-off, $500,000, Empowering Communities - Enhancing Lives Fund for projects that aim to enhance community wellbeing," he said.
Manager Policy and Strategy Melissa Jackson said that 3,584 pieces of individual community feedback were received on the Long Term Plan including responses to the survey and people voting for the issues most important to them.
“The Long Term Plan engagement offered a platform for residents to share their thoughts on the key priorities that they want Council to focus on in the next ten-year 2024/34 Long Term Plan period.
The findings are now being analysed to enable the Community Boards and local iwi to recommend which projects within their areas should be prioritised.
The findings and Community Board project recommendations will feed into Council's considerations in planning the 2024/34 Long Term Plan work programme.
There were 69 submissions to the Smoke and Vape Free Policy proposal and 75 submissions on school zone speed limit reduction proposals.
People who want to speak in support of their consultation submission can now do so before we analyse all the feedback and prepare the deliberation reports for Council's consideration.”
Executive Manager Community and Economic Development Pauline Welch said that 32 applications had been received for the Empowering Communities - Enhancing Lives Fund.
“We are very happy with range of project applications that are spread out across the district,” she said.
“However, we now have a huge task ahead of us as the current value of the applications is around $2.5 million for a one-off $500,000 fund.
The evaluation process is for Council to award funds for district wide projects and Community Boards for local projects.
As we want to ensure a fair process for all applicants, we will be working to ensure we can evaluate all projects equally whether they are district wide or local.
We also want to look at how we can assist projects to apply to alternative funding sources where possible.
There is quite a lot of work to get to this point, so consideration of funding decisions is unlikely to be before the new year.
In the interim, if people have any queries, they can call me at Council on 07 895 8188,” she said.
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