Three quarters of residents satisfied with council
More people thought the council had a good reputation than in the previous two years. Photo: File.
Almost three quarters of Tasman residents are satisfied with the council’s overall performance, but the region’s roads are letting council down.
Tasman District Council’s resident satisfaction survey for 2023 shows that overall satisfaction rates have climbed by 9 per cent from last year’s standing, to 73 per cent.
The percentage of respondents who thought council had a good reputation had also climbed, to 72 per cent, improving over 2021 and 2022’s scores but still below 2020’s 84 per cent.
“It is generally a good news story,” says Dwayne Fletcher, council’s strategic policy manager.
“The movements of some key factors… are notably up, not just a little bit.”
The survey also found that 100 per cent of library users were satisfied with those facilities.
But despite the positive increases, the council also saw signification satisfaction decrease on several fronts including stormwater services and kerbside recycling.
At 45 per cent satisfaction, roads were the council’s lowest performing area.
“We just can’t ignore this data, we need to do something about it,” councillor Mike Kininmonth says.
The report on the survey data says that poor satisfaction with the district’s roads aligned with council’s data that shows an increase in the number of surface faults which have resulted from several years of low investment and prolonged wet weather in 2022.
A “modest” increase to the road maintenance budget was made for the 2023/24 financial year and is expected to go “some way” towards addressing the backlog of repairs, but it was acknowledged that “significantly more investment” is needed in the future.
“We’ve got some conversations with you coming up for the Long-Term Plan and we’ll absolutely put this at the forefront of that,” Dwayne confirmed.
Alongside roads, cyclist safety, climate change preparedness, public consultation, greenhouse gas emissions, and rates were all under 60 per cent satisfaction, with resource management only sitting on 61 per cent.
The survey of 405 residents took place between April and June. 232 responses were gathered through landline, while 173 were collected via cell phone.
A quota system was used to ensure the sample of residents was representative of the age, location, and gender of Tasman’s total population. The margin of error for the survey was +/-4.9 per cent.
