Plan focused on Shelford’s future

THE final touches have been put on the Shelford Community Plan, and an upcoming meeting has been scheduled to discuss how best to implement it.

Created in collaboration between residents, Golden Plains Shire, and the Shelford Progress Association, the final document highlights the level of importance for the town’s ongoing projects.

With forums previously held to help steer the document’s development, community coordinator Glenn Jeffery said the upcoming meeting will be about how to go about seeing the listed projects become a reality.

“We finally have the document to take back to the community and we’re also doing a sort of what worked and what didn’t work and feeding that back to council,” he said.

“It’s pretty much the handover from council’s facilitators saying ‘we’ve helped you get to this point and now it’s up to you guys working with council on the delivery of these projects’.

“The planning’s finished and now it’s about how they can help us with things like building permits or planning permits.”

As well as a list of prioritised projects, the final document showcases Shelford’s people with an estimated more than 50 per cent of families contributing to the plan’s development.

The plan will serve as a template to guide the next three years’ worth of goals for the town, with the revivals of Shelford’s cricket club, hall, public toilets, and playground marked among the top six priorities.

Mr Jeffery said he’s most excited to see projects concerning the town’s waterways continue under the guidance of the community plan.

“We’ve got one about monitoring river quality to understand if anything will impact it,” he said. “We’ll be talking about getting some funding for beautification and weeding around the riverbanks.

“This is a four-year plan and we’ve already got the seed funding that goes with this period so that’s $10,000 in the bank to work on.”

Mr Jeffery said the document has ultimately been a well-thought-out one.

“I like the overall structure where the community is in charge with help from council,” he said.

“I’m confident we got in touch with everyone we could as well to actually talk to the ideas they wanted to see.”

The meeting will take place at the Shelford Cricket Club at 6pm on Thursday 3 August.