Shire makes significant progress on Council Plan

THE Surf Coast Shire is working its way through what needs to be done in its Council Plan, with the shire completing or making progress in almost all areas in its first year.

The key strategic document defining this council’s time in office, the Council Plan identifies outcomes, objectives and actions for where the shire and the council will focus their efforts over their four-year term, and was adopted by councillors in September 2021.

The following month, the council adopted the Monitoring and Evaluation Framework and Action Plan, which plots out the courses of action needed to achieve the strategies and targets set in the Council Plan, and how to measure progress.

Split into sections corresponding to the Council Plan’s seven themes, the 19 strategies are further broken down to 60 actions.

According to the progress report for the March-June period presented to councillors and noted by them at their September 27 meeting, 12 of the 60 actions are complete, while another 45 have started and are being implemented on an ongoing basis.

Only three actions have not started and are under review. They are:

• Develop and implement a succession of Reconciliation Action Plans, which has been endorsed by Reconciliation Australia and the Wadawurrung Traditional Owners Corporation but not yet by the Eastern Maar Aboriginal Corporation as the shire is “first focusing on building an improved relationship”
• Develop a State of Environment report to improve understanding of local environmental conditions and direct future environmental funding to where it is most needed, which has been put on hold “until it is understood if this project will be led by Council or Great Ocean Road Coast and Parks Authority in the future”, and
• Experiment to discover more effective methods to communicate and engage with people in our community on the most important issues, which was requested but not funded in the 2022/23 Budget.

Speaking at the meeting, Cr Liz Pattison said there were several highlights for her in the progress report.

“The NAIDOC Week exhibition with five First Nations artists was really well received; there’s cultural competency training, which has started across the whole council and there’s been significant uptake on that, we did some of that as councillors recently and I think it was really well received, that talked towards our theme around reconciliation and respectful engagement with First Nations.

“We delivered the Safe Cycling Strategy and a focus on integrated transport planning, and the council also was certified as a carbon-neutral organisation for its corporate operations for the 2021/22 financial year – this is the first full year the council has achieved that, which I is something I think is really great, and we should celebrate.

“There’s so much more that our council does than roads, rates and rubbish.”

Cr Paul Barker said it was good the Council Plan was developed with community input, but he was “concerned that as time goes, on the economic reality is hitting home, and the attempts to be everything for everyone is showing that it’s not possible”.

“As has been noted previously, it’s disappointing to not see organisational service performance in our core responsibilities as a key element of our plan.”