The most important issues for voters at the last council general election were rate rises and the new Local Environment Plan (LEP).  From the 35 candidates, voters lined up behind the nine who best represented their aspirations.

After having delivered a balanced 2009 budget without a rate rise above CPI, those elected representatives last month commenced assessing and shaping policy around the working-draft LEP.  This process will result in a new planning instrument that reflects the views of the majority of residents while also weighing in minority views. 

In addition to the initial working-draft document prepared by our planning staff, councillors have over a dozen other State guideline documents and Acts to take into consideration.

These days, much of the LEP is dictated by the NSW Department of Planning to produce state wide uniformity.  The Department has proscribed numerous compulsory clauses throughout the document.  It also has provided numerous optional clauses that councillors can choose to include or not include depending on any local policy need that isn’t covered by the State clauses. I think the theory behind allowing local councils to mix and match these optional State developed clauses is to provide a sense of local autonomy and destiny.

Councils can also determine local zoning, add to zone uses, and input numeric values such as minimum lot sizes, building heights, and number of bedrooms at a Bed and Breakfast establishment, to name just a few.

In this website update, I hope answer a few of your questions and to share with you some of the views that I’m bringing to this assessment and policy setting activity.  They are consistent with the undertakings that I made to electors during the 2008 campaign and include:

• Preserving your equitable and
   property rights
• Cutting red tape and rhetoric
• Enhancing local employment prospects
• Making our community more prosperous
• Improving council transparency
• Being straight talking and
• Applying common sense

In the following pages you will find what I consider to be the first principles I’ll apply to this process as well as some key community focal point goals. I don’t suggest for one moment that everyone in the shire will agree with these points. However, I’d presume if they don’t, they will have elected one of the other eight councillors who more closely represents their outlook and who will bring that better fitting view to the process.

The LEP is not in itself a development plan.  It isn’t going to create a park, build a shop, or develop a block of land.  The LEP is just the document that lays out some orderly parameters by which others can undertake such things.  Depending on those parameters (zoning, permitted uses, and other criteria) an LEP can encourage or discourage people to invest in Palerang’s future and hence our residents’ future too. 

Millennia of history has shown that with creativity, ingenuity, investment and exertion the next generation can be better provided for than the last. A progressive 21st Century LEP for Palerang can facilitate that continuing to be the case here.

                                 8 March 2010