Several months ago, my first column dealt with my efforts to get through and understand Volume 1 of the FNDC Far North Future Plan covering the period of 2006 to 2016.
Foolishly I promised to work through the rest of these vast tomes to report to you, the readers what these plans contain. Well, I’ve been reminded that I haven’t got back to either reading or reporting on them, so last weekend I dug them out to see just why I thought Volume 1 was such a depressing waste of ratepayer’s money and to advance on to Volume 2.
There are five volumes in total and there are 539 pages devoted to this exercise, which has clearly been taken seriously by the platoon of staff who have made their career out of producing these excellently presented volumes. Indeed the standard of graphics and print detail exceeds what many countries devote to the printing of their currency!
Volume 1 was entitled Our Community and dealt with lots of unmeasurable stuff. Volume 2 at 168 pages is the winner by weight and is called Council Activities. It also details lots more unmeasurable stuff that council does. Quite a lot of this stuff appears several times under different headings so either it is done several times or is trying to look like that.
Stormwater, for instance appears under the heading Water and Waste Group as one might expect but makes at least one other appearance under Safety and Environment Group. I note that I found inked markings that I had made in the margins during a previous effort to get through this volume. Typically these notes read “crap” and other such common terms for what they pass off as Customer Service.
Quaintly, complaints are now termed “requests for service” by council. I’ll bet they get a few if you can get past the recorded propaganda and actually talk to someone at the other end of the phone line. There are some spurious measures for phone calls to council with the suggestion that in 2006, 80% of calls were answered in 60 seconds and 100% in 2007. It fails to point out that most of us want to be answered by a person and the recorded message that I have actually listened to for 11 minutes does not meet my expectation of a call being responded to in 60 seconds.
Volume 2 is full of graphs plotting heroic increases in everything over coming years but sadly no graph plots what FNDC’s performance for any of these measures has been over the past 5 years so there is conveniently no base information to compare the future with.
One can’t help feeling that the money and effort put into these volumes could have been better spent on one or two pages of a clear executive summary of the really big things. Three more volumes to go!!
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