Streets Alive Yarra recommends that the City of Yarra improve transparency and commit to open government, because we believe that this would help build a more beautiful, liveable and accessible city.
We published on this topic in 2021: https://streets-alive-yarra.org/journal/open-government/. Now, with a new Council, we encourage Councillors to examine the issue again. We offer the following suggestions:
- Publish reports from external contractors
- Publish a fuller and more transparent organisational chart
Publish reports
The City of Yarra often commissions reports from external consultants. These are defined packages of work, each with a specific deliverable, i.e. a report. In our view, these external reports do not comprise advice from Officers to Councillors, which could be considered as confidential; rather, they comprise advice from contractors to Officers, which can be published. We suggest that Council resolve to publish any report received by any external consultant within one month of the report being received by council. In addition we recommend publishing all reports received within the last five years, and publishing the brief that was issued to the contractor to commission each report. Clearly, by exception, Council could decide that any particular report should remain confidential. “Publication” could be very simple, e.g. making PDFs available for download from the council website.
Publish a fuller and more transparent organisational chart
Staff costs represent council’s single largest cost category. Transparency regarding the cost of each team, and each role, can help residents and ratepayers to offer feedback to Councillors on what services they would like council to provide. Considering that each council staff role was at some point advertised in the public domain, including a title, remuneration band, and detailed role description, it would appear difficult for council to claim that publishing a complete organisational chart would breach confidentiality or be contrary to the public interest. Instead, publishing the organisational chart would be a clear commitment to open government. A first step could be to add information to the existing publicly available organisational chart (see attached image), such as the FTE staff, staff budget, and the total budget managed by that role. Such a diagram would help many people to gain a reasonable overview of staffing and expenditure, in a quick glance. Future steps could be to add another level to the chart (while only publishing the role title, not names), or to make the chart interactive, e.g. clicking on a role would expand the diagram to show a description of that team, the roles within that team, and even the IDs and budgets of the projects that the team is managing.
Emailed to councillors on 14 February 2025. Published 16 February 2025.