Flood Hazard Maps - The Best Kept Secrets Aren't Always Best Kept Secret

Tauranga City Council (TCC) has embarked on a stormwater 2D modeling project that at its conclusion will see the whole of the City remodelled.

A critical workstream within the project, focused on ensuring that landowners were kept informed of any new or existing information that affected their land. As a result TCC took a “no secrets approach” in a bid to ensure the process was transparent to the public.

TCC’s goal was:

• To provide accurate and understandable information (and meet legislative requirements) to landowners and give them an opportunity to engage with suitably qualified TCC staff around the impacts of the information provided.

The workstream was active in the roll out of information to landowners in two catchments in 2011. Six catchments were released in 2014 and a further seven are planned to be released in 2015.

The project deliverables are:

• To ensure that information that is received by a landowner is specific to their own property.
• To provide landowners with various options to engage with TCC staff around the information that they have been supplied.
• To ensure the information that is received by the landowner is accurately recorded and held in TCC’s business systems.

The process has been massive, but highly valuable. The process of direct communication hasn’t been as scary as we first anticipated. We have tweaked and adjusted our approaches as our experience has grown. To date, we have released approximately 6,000 letters and held 19 public information days. As flooding events occur and this modelling information is more widely known in the public domain, TCC’s elected members are also engaging with our communities. They have a greater understanding that by having a “no secrets” approach we are able to make better decisions around funding and priorities for infrastructure investments than we have in the past