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Prospect Section 30

As with all Section 30 reviews, the purpose of the Prospect Section 30 Review was to identify which planning issues required resolution through changes to the Development Plan to ensure that community needs and expectations can be met. Issues raised in this review included population and density increases in certain locations; housing affordability; heritage listings; the future of industry-zoned land; and traffic management. Of particular interest was the promotion of mixed-use, higher-density development along arterial roads and the role that policies relating to car parking can play in hampering or encouraging these forms of development.

For this project, the City of Prospect commissioned URPS in a slightly different way. Planning staff at Prospect developed the Section 30 review 'in house', but called on URPS at key points to provide strategic advice and facilitate consultation with council staff and the elected members. This helped to blend local knowledge with fresh ideas and procedural experience. The result was a Development Plan Review that is carefully tailored to the community's desires but challenges some conventional wisdom regarding how such a document should be structured.

The Minister for Urban Development & Planning released the Ministerial Mount Barker Urban Growth Development Plan Amendment (DPA) in June 2010 for public consultation. This DPA proposes to rezone approximately 1300 hectares of rural land on the edges of Mt Barker and Nairne for residential and light industrial use.

With the aim of ensuring that its community was well informed and empowered to comment on the Ministerial DPA, the District Council of Mt Barker engaged URPS to run a series of information sessions for the local community. These six sessions were extremely well attended, with more than 300 people able to hear about and ask questions regarding the Ministerial DPA process and how to go about getting involved in this part of the planning system.

In a letter to the editor of the Mt Barker Courier, Jean Lovell of Nairne said that "Mt Barker Council is to be congratulated for its commitment to proper community consultation" and that URPS was "highly professional and responded in detail to questions in an articulate, honest and informed manner".

This is evidence of the success of these types of community information sessions and the goodwill and engagement that Mt Barker Council has fostered with its community through the process. We also believe that this type of process leads to informed and valuable input from the community to key planning initiatives such as this Ministerial DPA."