Dear Dunedin City Council,

My preference is to receive the requested information by email.

The agenda for the Dog Control Working Party meetings was pre-set. No opportunity was provided for non-Official members of the Working Party to request items be placed on the agenda, suggest items for the agenda or identify and discuss issues that were not already on the agenda. The audio record records that the act of identifying issues that slightly expanded items already on the agenda and being discussed were ruled out of order by the Chair if the member was one of those designated a “dog owner”. The audio record also records that the Working Party member was then subjected to a punishment in the form of a humiliating personal insult and prohibition on any further participation, in one case for almost the whole of the meeting.

Accordingly I have been requested by members of the Dunedin Dog Bylaw Group to ask who was responsible for selecting the agenda items and the criteria used to select them. I have also been asked to request a statement of the reasons the agenda was so fixed that when the natural flow of the discussion caused a person designated a dog owner to respond to that discussion by identifying other relevant and directly related issues this was viewed as justifying subjecting them to humiliating insults and denying them any further participation in the meeting.

Yours faithfully,
Karen Anderson