Open Government – Streets Alive Yarra Inc.

Streets Alive Yarra believes that the the City of Yarra should:

commit to open government,
improve transparency and integrity, and
improve planning and service delivery,

because this would help build a more beautiful, liveable and accessible city. The new CEO can do this by implementing the actions described in this report, and councillors can help by passing appropriate motions.

Context

The City of Yarra has adopted a Public Transparency Policy, which states:

Council information must be publicly available unless the information is confidential or public availability of the information would be contrary to the public interest.
City of Yarra Public Transparency Policy

Public transparency is one part of open government:

Open government is the governing doctrine which sustain that citizens have the right to access the documents and proceedings of the government to allow for effective public oversight.
Lathrop, Daniel; Ruma, Laurel, eds. (February 2010). Open Government: Transparency, Collaboration and Participation in Practice

The City of Yarra does not need a crisis, such as what happened at the City of Ipswich, to commit to open government. Indeed, every change offers an opportunity, and with a new CEO, the City of Yarra has a wonderful opportunity to:

commit to open government,
improve transparency and integrity, and
improve planning and service delivery.

To address the above opportunities, the CEO can:

deploy a transparency and integrity hub,
publish the organisational chart,
improve the organisational structure,
define a better performance metric,
publish reports,
publish data, and
crowdsource data.

Councillors can support these actions by passing appropriate motions.

Open Government Partnership Australia

Australia has committed to open government, and engagement with the international Open Government Partnership, via Open Government Partnership Australia:

Draft commitments for the 3rd national action plan include building better connections, data sharing, and open by design:

Image credit: https://ogpau.pmc.gov.au/consultations/phase-2c-final-consultation-draft-commitments

Yarra, via the CEO, can also commit to this. The role of the CEO is defined by the Local Government Act 2020 section 46, including:

ensuring the effective and efficient management of the day to day operations of the council
Local Government Act 2020

The CEO can support open government, and improve service delivery, with actions such as:

deploy a transparency and integrity hub,
publish the organisational chart,
improve the organisational structure,
publish a better performance metric,
publish reports,
publish data, and
crowdsource data.

Councillors can support these actions by passing appropriate motions. Proposals for motions are included in Appendix A.

Deploy a transparency and integrity hub

The City of Ipswich has a Transparency and Integrity Hub, claimed to be best practice for a local government council in Australia. It was initiated by a motion that was adopted on 27th April 2020. The City of Ipswich states in a FAQ that it cost $200k to set up.

If the Ipswich Transparency and Integrity Hub is best practice, it would appear difficult for the City of Yarra to claim that publishing similar data would breach confidentiality or be contrary to the public interest. On the contrary, publishing such a hub would be a clear commitment to open government.

Publish the organisational chart

The City of Yarra has approximately 1,000 staff, and staff costs represent council’s single largest cost category. Without access to a complete organisational chart, residents and ratepayers can find it difficult to identify what each role delivers, or to link a role back to an adopted policy, strategy or plan. In theory, it should be easy for council to justify each role, or the size of each team, by clearly communicating such links. Transparency regarding the cost of each role, or each team, can help residents and ratepayers to offer feedback to council on what services they would like council to provide.

Publishing a complete organisational chart would also align with the Local Government Act 2020 section 46(4) requirement for the CEO to prepare a workforce plan that describes the organisational structure of the council and specifies projected staffing requirements for the next four years. Note that while the Local Government Act 2020 section 46(6) requires the CEO to make the workforce plan available to the Mayor, Deputy Mayor, Councillors and staff, the act does not proscribe the CEO from making the workforce plan available to residents and ratepayers.

Considering that each council staff role is (or was) advertised in the public domain, including a title, remuneration band, and detailed role description, it would appear difficult for council to claim that publishing an organisational chart (or indeed the workplace plan) would breach confidentiality or be contrary to the public interest. On the contrary, publishing the organisational chart would be a clear commitment to open government.

Improve the organisational structure

The City of Yarra manages 491 kilometres of footpaths and 260 kilometres of road pavement in accordance with multiple strategies, policies and plans. Unfortunately, the management of our streets is spread between multiple departments, including:

Corporate, Business & Financial Services
City Works and Assets
Planning and Placemaking

This can lead to a loss of accountability, expenditure efficiency, productivity, and engagement. Cross-departmental issues, such as how best to allocate street space to different transport modes, have no clear process for resolution. For example, the authority to ‘design on-street parking’ lies within the ‘Compliance’ team within ‘Corporate, Business and Financial Services’. ‘Design of on-street parking’ includes:

Understanding how parking fits within the broader aims of urban design
Determining how much public land should be allocated to on-street parking
Determining what price should be charged for on-street parking

A better approach would be for strategic decisions regarding parking design to be made by the ‘Urban Design’ team within ‘Planning and Placemaking’. With this arrangement, the ‘Compliance’ team would focus on compliance. The CEO can realise this, at no cost, by moving the relevant ‘parking design’ officers to ‘Urban Design’. This move would deliver the following benefits:

Instead of expecting officers in the compliance team to be both designers and enforcers, this move would better match the skill sets of different teams; with urban designers responsible for planning the overall strategy and specifying the regulations; and with compliance officers responsible for enforcing the regulations.
It would eliminate any real or perceived conflicts of interest, by separating out the design of the regulations from the enforcement of the regulations.

Similarly, the authority to design the layout of streets, e.g. to allocate public space to vehicle lanes, pinch points or pocket parks, lies within the ‘Traffic Engineering’ team within ‘City Works and Assets’. Again, a better approach would be for strategic decisions regarding the design of public space to be made by the ‘Urban Design’ team. With this arrangement, the ‘Traffic Engineering’ team would focus on engineering compliance, e.g. asphalt thickness or turning radii. The CEO can realise this, at no cost, by moving the ‘Traffic Engineering’ team to report to ‘Urban Design’. Further insight is available at Strong Towns, in the article ‘engineers should not design streets’.

Define a better performance metric

Performance metrics are a clear commitment to open government because they provide a quantitative measure of the progress that council is making. For the quality of biking infrastructure in Yarra, the single most representative metric is the percentage of people biking who are women. In the Netherlands, the metric is over 50%. In Yarra, we suggest that the metric would return a result of less than 30% today, and should return a significantly higher result (e.g. greater than 45%) by 2030.

Council can assess the percentage of women on a the first Tuesday of March each year (the same day as Bicycle Network conducts its Super Tuesday counts) for people cycling along five common activity centre streets (e.g. Swan Street, Bridge Road, Victoria Street, Smith Street, Brunswick Street). Another option is to commission Bicycle Network to conduct the count at a representative number of locations in Yarra. Once established as a performance metric, the performance ‘gap’ will be clearly visible, and the onus will be on council to commit to closing the gap. Council can do this by using internationally proven and well understood methods such as traffic calming within Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, and building a network of protected bike lanes to link the Low Traffic Neighbourhoods.

Publish reports

The City of Yarra often commissions reports from external consultants. These are defined packages of work, with a defined deliverable, i.e. a report. Council can better deliver on open government by committing to promptly publishing any external report.

Considering that reports are paid for by public (i.e. council) funds, it would appear difficult for the City of Yarra to claim that promptly publishing reports would breach confidentiality or be contrary to the public interest. Clearly, the definition of ‘prompt’ is subjective; we suggest publishing reports within one month of receipt.

Publish data

The City of Yarra has adopted an Open Data policy, but the breadth and detail of data is sorely lacking compared with best practice councils such as Brisbane City Council. For example:

The CEO can improve transparency by directing officers to publish data that enables different neighbourhoods to be compared, and thus enables residents and ratepayers to justify requests to ‘level up’ a particular neighbourhood. Detailed suggestions of what data to publish are included in Appendix A.

Crowdsource data

If the City of Yarra lacks data, or lacks the resources to collate data in a timely manner, the CEO can direct officers to reduce the time and cost for collating data by adopting crowdsourcing. Using a simple webform together with the geolocation and camera functions of smartphones, residents and ratepayers could upload data into council’s Geographical Information System (GIS). It would take little time for an officer to check each data, before adding it to the database.

Concluding remarks

Streets Alive Yarra believes that the the City of Yarra should commit to open government, improve transparency and integrity, and improve planning and service delivery, because this would help build a more beautiful, liveable and accessible city. The new CEO can do this by implementing the actions described in this report, and councillors can help by passing appropriate motions.

Appendix A – Draft text of motions

Motion to deploy a Transparency and Integrity Hub

Note: based on the original from Ipswich

That Council:

A. Establish and implement the City of Yarra Transparency and Integrity Hub, a digital portal that enables the publication of financial data displayed as contemporary open data (intuitive, interactive, auditable and downloadable by selection) suitable for public consumption. The Transparency and Integrity Hub will support the Democracy and Governance strategic objective of the Council Plan and will be launched by 1 July 2022.

Underpinning Principles

Adopt global best practice approach to open and transparent public sector financial management
Demonstrate responsible and transparent governance and decision-making
Enable data-driven decision making and rebuild public and stakeholder trust

Hub Deliverable

Publish as near to real-time financial data for Yarra City Council in an open, transparent, interactive portal including, at a minimum:
1. Previous five financial years financial data including detailed project income and expenditure financial data for major projects;
2. Council’s 2021-2022 Budget;
3. Quarterly financial reporting against the budget.
Publish detailed income and expenditure financial data for all current and past Council beneficial (controlled) entities enabling comparison over the previous five financial years.
Publish all contracts valued $10,000 or more (excluding GST) for a rolling period of five consecutive years. New data will continue to be published monthly and the information published will be improved in alignment with best practice across Victoria and Australia. The new register will include:
1. Suppliers who tendered a response
2. Person/company with whom Council has entered into the contract
3. Contract number
4. Commencement and end dates
5. Value of the contract (estimated/ maximum value)
6. Purpose of the contract/ description of goods and service procured
7. Approver/ Council decision reference (i.e. link to published minutes)

Publish all Councillor related expenses, allowances and reimbursements for each month including contextual details of expenses incurred and purpose to enable benchmarking and comparison. Data will be published for the previous five financial years. Where travel costs have been absorbed by specific project costs, these should also be included.

B. Procure, through open tender, a suitable digital platform to enable the delivery of the Transparency and Integrity Hub, ensuring that the platform:

is intuitive and user friendly, easy to maintain, secure and auditable;
enables contemporary open data (intuitive, interactive, auditable and downloadable by selection);
is best of breed software for the task for public sector transparency;
creates efficiencies in financial data reporting;
enables visualisations and context suitable for public consumption;
allows data to be downloaded as CKAN OpenData;
produces data in machine readable format; and
directly integrates with Council systems and solutions for ease of use and rapid adoption.

C. Bring forward a review of Council’s Open Data Policy to ensure alignment with best-practice approaches to publishing financial data.

Motion to publish the organisational chart

That Council:

Publish an organisational chart showing all roles, including the title of each role and the remuneration band of each role
For all roles that report to the CEO, a Director or a Group Manager, include the name of the person occupying the role, a role description of 50 to 100 words, and the total number of people below them in the organisational chart
Update the organisational chart each month, if any changes have occurred
Publish the workforce plan

Motion to publish reports

That Council:

In future, publish any report received by any external consultant within 1 month of the report being received by council.
Do not attempt to bypass this directive by asking consultants to issue “draft” or “interim” reports, with the “final” report being held back until the council is ready to publish. In case of doubt, the date of receipt of the report is considered to be the date of payment of at least 90% of the contract cost.
Publish all reports received by council within the last five years.

Motion to publish data

That Council, for each of the 21 defined Local Area Place Making (LAPM) precincts:

Publish the number of:
1. rateable households,
2. public trees (i.e. located on roads or parks, not on private property),
3. on-street car parking bays managed by council,
4. on-street car parking permits issued by council, and
5. bike parking racks managed by council.
Publish council’s best estimate of the population of:
1. residents, and
2. workers.
Publish the area of:
1. private properties,
2. roads, and
3. parks (or public park and recreation zone).
Publish the annual revenue from:
1. rates,
2. parking permits,
3. parking meters, and
4. parking fines.
Update the data each year.

Motion to crowdsource data

That Council:

Use crowdsourcing methods to reduce the time and cost of collating data such as:
1. the location of each tree,
2. the location of each on-street car parking bay, and
3. the location of each bike parking rack.

Published 1st December 2021

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