The Council has ongoing relationships across many communities to provide support and to understand their priorities.

Project-based engagement is through the lifetime of a project. During project development, we provide many ways for people to tell us their ideas and perspectives.

• Early engagement: During the early stages of a project, we gather people’s ideas in many ways, e.g. surveys, workshops or speaking directly to the community. Sometimes what you tell us will then feed into options that we test during a consultation (e.g. the District Plan). We engage early to ensure community insights shape proposals.
• Consultation: A consultation is a type of engagement where the findings are taken to a Council meeting and help Councillors and the Mayor to make decisions. By the time we go out to consult the community, options have been developed using information from the community as well as subject matter experts. The community can indicate their preferred option and provide further feedback which may lead to changes in the final decision.

Community priorities are gathered during the early stages of developing the city’s Long-term Plan. This document sets the Council’s direction for 10 years, outlines what we will be investing in, how much it may cost and how this will be funded. The Long-term Plan is developed based on community feedback as well as other factors like financial constraints.