Parramatta City Council’s Residents’ Panel is a group of people from all walks of life who have volunteered to represent all sectors of our community in ongoing public consultations. The original target was to have enough persons equivalent to one per cent of the area’s population (1500 residents) and that the panel to be statistically valid and representative demographically and geographically of the population of the Parramatta Local Government Area. We have achieved this and would like to increase engagement to 3000 residents in due course.
The panel will be actively involved in providing information and advice to Council decisions. Panel members will receive feedback on how their input has been received and what were the outcomes . Updates to all consultations will be made via this website.
The Residents’ Panel Team are always looking for younger residents to be involved with the Panel. Recently newly created Story Boards were distributed around local High Schools, Granville TAFE, UWS and other facilities. The purpose of the Story Board is to help Youth easily identify the purpose and role of Parramatta City Council.
The Residents’ Panel are holding a competition for any local residents’ over the age of 16. The aim of the competition is to help create awareness and interest for the Youth of the community to be involved with Parramatta City Council’s Residents’ Panel. The Youth of the community will receive the benefits of being a Residents’ Panel member, such as:
The competition commences Monday 16 November and concludes on Monday 7 December.
Currently, Parramatta City Council Lord Mayoral elections are held annually, with popularly elected Councillors voting amongst themselves which member of the Chamber will be the Civic Leader of the city for the following twelve months.
An alternatively model adopted by some Council’s has a popularly elected Lord Mayor, in which residents vote directly for a Lord Mayor from amongst the candidates at Local Government elections held every four years.
There are arguments for and against this.
To gauge community opinion on this matter, all Resident Panel members will be asked about this later in the year. We will also provide information for and against these two alternative models for Panel members to consider when making comment.
A mail or email based survey (depending on Resident Panel preferences) will be sent to all members on the 18th of November 2009
Resident Panel team members will be interviewing Council park users in December to understand their levels of satisfaction and anticipated usage of parks across the Parramatta Local Government Area.
2300 members have joined the Residents' Panel so far. To increase enagagement with the Community we would now like to aim for our target to 3000 Confirmed Panel members.
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