Since 2023 I’ve been assisting Nelson City Council in the process of asking the community for its thoughts on a $40 million infrastructure project for its central city.
The 'Bridge to Better' project aims to improve water infrastructure, provide capacity for hundreds of city centre homes and revitalise Bridge Street. The council allocated $32m to the project in its 2021-31 Long Term Plan, with an additional $36m from the government's Infrastructure Acceleration Fund.
Bridge to Better was the first project to come out of Te Ara ō Whakatū, Nelson's spatial plan for the city centre.
Stakeholder mapping
Engagement strategy
Shaping engagement and communications collateralPlanning and facilitating Stakeholder workshops
Facilitating one on one stakeholder conversations
Reporting
A project of this scale impacts a significant portion of the community and a ‘one size fist all’ approach to engagement wouldn’t generate the detailed insight required by the design team, or build the trust and confidence that is necessary to ensure a successful outcome. Since 2023 I’ve been working as part of the project team managing community engagement, alongside specialists who are overseeing iwi and retail resilience engagement activity.
As part of our strategic pre-engagement activity we developed detailed stakeholder maps and commenced with one on one and group meetings. To build trust in Council’s process we reflected back what we had learned during the successful Te Ara ō Whakatū process and sought to understand if those values and desires were still relevant now we had a specific project to align them to. This helped our design team narrow down what success would look like for each stakeholder group (and the individuals within it) and start to create a concept design that both met the technical brief but also helped deliver an outcome that brought energy back to our city centre.
The process has now progressed to the detailed design phase with some key milestones around layout and design successfully ticked off. During 2024 we’ll continue to engage with all stakeholders and ensure their feedback, ideas and concerns are addressed in a way that inspires confidence and builds trust.
Construction on this project is due to commence in 2026.