LGOIMA requests

The Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 (LGOIMA) is intended to make official information held by local authorities more freely available and to promote openness in local government decision-making. It gives members of the public the right to request information held by councils and supports public access to council meetings through the publication of Council Meeting Agendas and Minutes.

Transparency is central to the purpose of LGOIMA. The Act is designed to support accountability and public confidence by enabling communities to understand how councils make decisions, spend public money, and carry out their statutory functions. It also recognises that openness and the public interest in disclosure must sometimes be balanced against legitimate interests such as privacy, commercial interests and maintenance of legal professional privilege.

The number of LGOIMA requests received by Far North District Council is increasing. A comparison of requests for information received during the first six months of 2025 with the first six months of 2026 shows that requests increased by 21.3 per cent (from 240 to 291).

As well as receiving more requests, the requests themselves are becoming more complex, broad in scope and are often generated using AI. While routine requests for property ownership information, rating records, and consent documentation remain a significant component of the council’s LGOIMA workload, there has been a notable increase in requests relating to:

• council governance and decision-making processes
• financial expenditure, procurement, contracts, and funding allocation
• Māori engagement, co-governance arrangements, and iwi/hapū partnerships
• animal management and compliance activities
• major infrastructure projects, roading, water services, and capital expenditure
• large-scale requests for correspondence, reports, meeting records, and historical information.

The council recognises that some information requests are of greater public interest than others. To address this desire for information and to increase transparency, we plan to publish information on these ‘high interest’ subjects as they start to feature in LGOIMA requests to the council. These updates will provide critical context on issues frequently asked about, address common misunderstandings about the work of council and assist residents to quickly access information they need without having to go through the LGOIMA process.

Of particular interest recently has been the topic of external appointments to Council Committees. Click on the link to find out more.