The Star: November 01, 2018

18 Thursday November 1 2018
Latest Christchurch news at www.star.kiwi
The Star
News
Bid to bring
psychologist
to Dallington
• By Georgia O’Connor-
Harding
AUSTRALIAN disaster recovery
expert and psychologist Dr Rob
Gordon could be brought in
to investigate ongoing social
isolation issues in Dallington
following the February 22, 2011,
earthquake.
The Coastal-Burwood
Community Board will meet
next week to plan how to make
bringing a disaster psychologist
into Dallington will come into
fruition.
A seminar will be held to
consider bringing Dr Gordon
to the city and the cost to do
that. The meeting will also
consider the current issues
facing Dallington and the wider
suburbs on the residential red
zone fringe.
It comes after the Dallington
Community Trust has asked for
funding from the board for a
disaster psychologist.
The trust wants the
disaster psychologist to
investigate the extent of the
issue and turn it into a wellness
programme.
Understanding the money trail
• By Julia Evans
FORMER investment banker
and city councillor Raf Manji
wants to make the city’s finances
understandable.
Cr Manji said as it stands the
city council’s finances are totally
unpalatable to the people they
impact the most – ratepayers.
He said finances were currently
“static” and
“opaque” and
planned to have
simpler layout
and graphics
to help make
city council
Raf Manji
spending more
digestible.
In the 2017-18
financial year, the city council
reported $13.1 billion in assets, its
revenue was $992 million and its
borrowing was $1.9 billion.
It’s large figures like those, Cr
Manji said were hard for residents
to understand.
Not only that, he said city
councillors themselves struggle.
“The issue for me is that it’s
clearly problematic when councillors
can’t understand them,”
Cr Manji said.
So he has been working on a
plan to present the city council’s
finances in terms that everyone
understands.
“The plans are to make the
financial information more accessible
. . . at the moment if you
look at the info, it’s very difficult
to understand. So I want to eventually
get it online in things like
simple pie charts and you will
be slowly able to drill down into
council spending,” he said.
Cr Manji said the plan would
be implemented in stages – starting
with a new layout to this
week’s finance and performance
committee meeting agenda.
“We’re spending a lot of time
doing reports on things that no
one ever reads,” he said.
At a recent meeting Cr
Manji, the city council’s finance
spokesman, presented the annual
report, which breaks down
spending and income for the last
year.
He said he was “disappointed”
there was no discussion on the
250-page report.
“Yet there was half an hour on
FINANCES:
City
councillor Raf
Manji wants
ratepayers
to be able
to easily
understand
where their
money is
being spent.
funding being approved,” he said.
Cr Manji said the goal was to
make future Annual Plans and
Long Term Plans incredibly easy
to understand.
But he said it would also relate
to the recent city council resident
satisfaction survey, which
revealed residents were unhappy
with decision-making and did
not feel like they could participate
in council processes.
“It’s clearly an area we can
improve on and I think this
would help,” he said.
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