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Renmark Paringa Strategic Plan

The Renmark Paringa Council engaged URPS to undertake a review of their strategic plan and provide it with a set of practical performance measures that could be used to monitor its progress.

The review involved Council staff across all areas of its operations, including field staff and customer service officers, in identifying the achievements made during the life of the previous plan. They also prioritised the initiatives, whether new or ongoing, that they wanted to see in the strategic plan for 2009-2014.

Two workshops were held with elected members to review and confirm the vision, mission, values and goals and to test and further develop the strategies and actions. Council endorsed the draft strategic plan for consultation, and community meetings were held in Lyrup and Renmark.

Considerable effort was spent working with Council's senior staff to develop a comprehensive but simple set of performance measures, incorporating both financial and non-financial measures; community trends; and organisational performance indicators. The project demonstrated how the strategic planning skills of URPS personnel extend to the development of performance indicators suited to the local context.

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."