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Walkerville Strategic Plan

URPS has worked with elected members and senior management from the Town of Walkerville to develop a draft strategic plan suitable for consultation with the wider community. Two workshops were held with councillors to develop a draft vision, mission, values and goals. Council staff assisted in the preparation of draft strategies to achieve these goals.

We briefed elected members to act as observers and recorders at an open day, which included two interactive workshops and informal drop-in sessions. Over 100 people participated in the consultation and their comments were reflected in the final strategic plan. In this way, the role of URPS went well beyond the development of the strategic plan as we also passed on expertise in community consultation to the local decision makers. This process also enhanced local democracy as it equipped elected members to partake in consultations with their community in the future.

A workshop was also held with councillors to develop performance measures to enable the ongoing implementation of the plan's strategies to be assessed against its goals.

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."