Short answer
AI public information search lets council staff, and later residents, ask questions in plain English and get answers quoted from the council’s own plans, bylaws, minutes and reports, with a link to each source. In New Zealand it has to work inside LGOIMA: any question can be a request for information, prompts and outputs are official information, and decisions on requests stay with people.
- Answer only from council documents, and cite the clause or page every time.
- A question typed into a search box can be an LGOIMA request; route it, do not answer it.
- AI prompts and outputs used for council business are official information and public records.
- Start staff-facing on published material before opening a resident-facing version.
What AI public information search does for a council
AI public information search answers questions from the council’s own documents and shows the paragraph it used. A planner asks “what is the maximum building height in the Medium Density Residential Zone?” and gets the rule, the plan chapter and a link, instead of a list of 40 PDFs.
The useful corpus is larger than most people expect: the operative and proposed district plans, bylaws, the long-term plan and annual plans, adopted policies, open agendas and minutes, and LGOIMA responses already released. The hard part is not the search. It is knowing which version is current, which documents are public, and which questions the system must not answer itself.
The workflow at a glance
- Inputs
- A question from a staff member (later, a resident), plus an indexed set of published council documents with version dates and status (operative, proposed, superseded).
- Systems
- The council’s EDRMS or SharePoint, the website’s document library, the meetings system, a retrieval index and a language model that answers only from retrieved text.
- Steps
- Classify the question; route anything that requests unpublished information to the LGOIMA queue; retrieve passages; draft an answer with citations; show sources and dates; log the exchange.
- Human review
- Staff check answers before they reach a resident. The LGOIMA team reviews every routed request. A records officer samples logs weekly.
- Outputs
- A cited answer, or a handover note that starts an official information request with the received date recorded.
- Measures
- Share of answers judged correct against a test set, citation accuracy, time to locate information, LGOIMA requests answered by pointing to published material.
- Risks
- Answering from a superseded plan, exposing public-excluded papers, treating a request as a chat, unlogged answers.
Illustrative example: one LGOIMA team, one month
Illustrative example: a provincial district council (synthetic figures) receives 50 LGOIMA requests a month. Assumptions: a third ask for information that is already published, locating material takes an average of 3 hours per request by hand, and AI-assisted search with officer review brings that to 1 hour.
| Item | Before | With AI search |
|---|---|---|
| Requests per month | 50 | 50 |
| Hours locating information | 150 | 50 |
| Requests answered by pointing to published material | Found late or missed | About 17 identified on day one |
| Officer review of AI-found material | Not applicable | Every request |
The arithmetic: 100 officer hours a month back for decision-making and drafting. Those hours only appear if the test set shows the search is finding what a careful officer would find; the evaluation method is in our guide to RAG retrieval evaluation.
Which New Zealand rules shape the design
Three rules change how this system is built.
- Any question can be a request. Under section 10 of LGOIMA, a request may be made in any form, including orally, and need not mention the Act. Section 13 then gives the council no more than 20 working days to decide it. A resident-facing search box must recognise “can I see the report on…” and start the clock, not answer from memory.
- The AI’s own outputs are official information. The Ombudsman’s advice for agencies on information requests and AI (6 October 2026) says prompts and responses generated for official purposes are subject to LGOIMA. It also says that when AI helps collate information, the agency should record the search parameters, have an official review the results, and tell the requester that AI was used.
- Logs are records. Section 17 of the Public Records Act 2005 requires every local authority to create and maintain full and accurate records of its affairs. Design the audit log with your records team before launch.
What stays with a person
People decide anything that carries legal weight. That includes whether a withholding ground under section 7 applies and whether the public interest outweighs it, charging, extensions, and refusals. It also includes any statement about a specific property’s consent history or compliance, and any answer the system cannot support with a cited source. The Ombudsman’s guidance is explicit that decisions on requests should still be made by people.
Where public information search goes wrong
| Failure | What it looks like | Control |
|---|---|---|
| Version drift | Quotes a rule from a superseded plan change | Index status and effective date; show both on every answer |
| Leaked confidential papers | Public-excluded agenda items (section 48 of LGOIMA) appear in results | Separate indexes by access level; test with known confidential items |
| Unsupported answer | Fluent reply with no source | Refuse to answer without a retrieved passage |
| Missed request | Resident asks for an unpublished report and gets a chat reply | Request classifier tested on last year’s LGOIMA log |
| Scanned documents | Older minutes are image-only PDFs and never match | OCR pass and a coverage report before launch |
Teach staff to check AI answers against sources during the pilot; the habit matters more than the interface.
What it costs and how to start
Cost is driven by document volume and quality, permissions work, and integration with the EDRMS and meetings system, not model fees. Start staff-facing with published material, build a test set of 150 real questions from last year’s enquiries and LGOIMA log, and only open a resident version once accuracy holds. Our RAG development service covers this build, and building private AI search explains the architecture.
The same document pipeline supports consent application completeness checks and public consultation theme analysis. The local government guide maps where each fits.
Sources
- Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act 1987 (version as at 1 October 2026), New Zealand Legislation, 2026
- Advice for agencies on information requests and AI, Office of the Ombudsman, 6 October 2026
- Public Records Act 2005 (version as at 6 June 2026), New Zealand Legislation, 2026
Written by the Levy Street team in Wellington. Last updated 19 October 2026.