Community councils are venting their frustration at the ACT government's fragmented style of consultation on development, and are urging a more cohesive approach.
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The chairs of two major community councils provided their views to online public hearings into the ACT budget on Friday, and to members of the planning, transport and city services committee.
During the hearings, the frustration of the councils was strongly evident. All of them volunteer their services, raise most of their operational funding internally and receive modest government funding, which barely covers administrative costs.
Collectively, they delivered a clear message that largely their efforts were undervalued and views ignored.
The head of the Woden valley community council described the government's attitude to council public meetings as one which "simply ticks the box so the government can ... say they consulted with us".
The Woden area is a significant focus for the ACT government's future infrastructure plan, with $300 million allocated to the new Canberra Institute of Technology, $40 million to the expansion of the Canberra Hospital in the coming financial year and the redevelopment of the Woden public transport hub to make it suitable for the coming electric bus fleet and Stage 2b of light rail.
Woden valley community council chair Fiona Carrick said that despite these big projects, the council's demand for better urban design, public spaces and community facilities "falls on deaf ears".
"There's a big lack of ambition for our town centres as the focus stays on consolidating in the [city] centre," Ms Carrick said.
"There's no ambition for areas like ours to be more than the urban infill policy and a transit hub to get people to the city."
Peter Elford, who has represented the Gungahlin community council for about a decade, described the engagement between the community and the ACT government over that period as "pitiful" and "incredibly fragmented".
"Most of the recent activities of the government have made it harder to be a community council, for example negotiating our own public liability insurance rather than doing a joint arrangement for all of them," he said.
"There's no ability for the councils to engage with government on a spatial level.
"Every single agency and directorate appears to be undertaking their own mechanism and processes for engagement and often they overlap, even within the same directorate.
"And in many situations, the data collected by the consultations is lost."
He said that examples of exemplary engagement, such as with the Gold Creek homestead project where a community panel was formed and well-educated on the issues, and the output of the consultation directly influenced the selection of the tenderer for the site, were rare.
"The difference between the good and the bad, in the majority of the consultations, are in the bad," he said.
He also deplored the lack of a single interface with government that pulls the activities together for a district.
"That could be one person, or an organisation, or it could be an entity that services multiple districts; the effort of trying to engage across all agencies would be greatly reduced and increase the effectiveness of the community councils."
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