Dear all
The date for comments closed on Friday, and certainly we are all feeling a little relieved to have the comments in.
I have had many mails with the relevant submissions, and there has been a massive amount of work put in. Thank you for all your effort.
We have come a long way and we have received a large amount of media exposure along the way thanks to Omnia Communications.
It is unclear how successful we will be, or how to even measure success in endeavours such as this. What is clear is we were able to get responses, even if we did not like them, and engage with the departments at a high level, as a result of having a unified front and a professional PR agency managing the programme.
However, this level of volunteer workload is not sustainable in the long term, nor do we know if it is the most effective mechanism for this sort of work. We have therefore been considering how to take this project forward.
Here are the options:
- Option 1 – Do nothing more. We have delivered most of what we originally intended to do, way back when at our initial meeting on 13 August. From appointing Omnia Communications, achieving an extended public comment period, several public meetings (though not the Mayor meeting), multiple public press statements and finally a consolidated set of reference comments from various organisations to enable their submissions. Whilst we are unsure of the outcome, I don’t think the effort can be faulted. We can close the operation at this point and respect our efforts.
- Option 2 – Build a longer term operation. This will be an extended project. The wheels of land-use and development, including By-Law amendments, are set in place years in advance, and to influence this process will require a multi-year approach (2-5 years). To this end we would need to formalise the operation and define the scope of activities. It would require a revenue model and a sustainable operating team.
Therefore, option 2 might provisionally look as follows:
Scope of Services for CRA
- Lead specific precedent setting legal court appeals for land use cases in the CoCT area. These would be cases that benefit all or the majority of CRA members. An example of this could be to challenge CoCT on the way that they are ignoring Local Area Overlays in their MPT decisions and appeals
- Develop long term planning and engineering studies at a district level to assist in capacity and service delivery questions and objections
- Long term public relations programme advocating for meaningful public participation and or lobbying at a policy development level. This could include a wide range of policies – not just those related to planning. Also to build relations with key council officials to be able to assist CRA members with linkages in issues that are unresolved
- Provide training to CRA Exco members so that they can be more efficient with their time
- Negotiate advantageous retainer fees so that CRA members can get access to legal and town-planning specialists at a reduced fee
- Back office support to associations (website, membership administration, billing, collections, communication, fundraising)
Revenue Model for CRA
- System providing revenue collection and membership tools for associations for a fee, or
- Subscription payable by member associations, or
- Subscription for back office services, or
- Paid for services tailored to individual member needs (legal, town planning, engineering)
With the goal of building a financial reserve to support the Scope of Services above.
We propose to use a portion of the remaining PR funds already collected to build the tools for billings and collections for associations to illustrate this conceptual approach.
We propose to hold a meeting with all CRA signatories on Monday 18 November 2024 to discuss the following topics:
- Evaluation of the past few months
- Discuss the 2 options listed above (and any other you may wish to propose)
- Vote on the way forward. If there is sufficient interest to continue, we will take the cues from that meeting.
Please add this link to your calendar – CRA Next Steps Meeting
We look forward to any comments or feedback.
Kind regards
The CRA Team