Community guide planned

Press, 28 April 1981, Page 22

Community guide planned

Christchurch local authorities plan to provide a guidelist in the yellow pages of the next Christchurch telephone directory so that people can find more easily organisations they should approach for help and advice.

A meeting of a committee of local authority representatives has considered a draft pamphlet, the content of which would be printed in the telephone directory. The pamphlet lists the areas of responsibility of local councils, the Christchurch Drainage Board, and the North Canterbury Catchment Board and Regional Water Board.

It also includes a list which shows what, organisation to approach in the event pf problems with floods, erosion on hillsides, roads,

drains, plumbing, drainage, pollution, sewage overflows, nuisances, public-health matters, and wandering stock or stray dogs. Mr J. F. Davidson, of the Christchurch Drainage Board, said at the meeting that he had suggested such a pamphlet about four years ago. He had received complaints from people who had been sent from one local authority to another when they had tried to resolve a problem.

A section on legal aid would be valuable because many people who wanted to act against council decisions were stifled by a lack of funds. The committee decided that advice about legal aid could go in a second pamphlet which could also include other information such as the financial support available for community groups through local councils. ,

It agreed that the contents of the pamphlet would be most widely available if they were printed as a page in the telephone directory. Several members of the committee said that pamphlets would be lost if they were distributed through letter boxes and. would not reach all residents if they were sent out with rate demands or left at libraries and council offices. They decided that negotiations be -started for a page for the guide in the yellow pages of the next telephone directory. They said that the cost of having -extra copies of the page printed should be ascertained so that individual copies could be distributed separately. The cost of the printing, which would be more than $lOOO, would be shared equally between the seven local authorities which made up the committee.