Charlotte Varcoe
THE District Council of Grant has endorsed its Strategic Plan 2024-2034 with a number of respondents supporting the document.
Respondents highlighted the support for council’s focus areas including community, economy, environment, infrastructure and council.
Support for inclusion including for First Nations people, isolated people and disability was also highlighted.
Other important topics brought to elected members’ attention included further support for hall upgrades, frustration at council members not getting to know their community in Pelican Point, desire for numeric indicators of success and more community gatherings.
Improved beach access at Pelican Point and continuing the railway pathway to Millicent was also highlighted.
On the Have Your Say website, council received 24 visitors with nine contributors.
The strategic plan came about after council worked closely with a citizens jury and elected members.
Key projects for council to achieve in the coming years included developing a contemporary community development plan, a camping initiative which provided infrastructure and systems for camping on council land and investigating the feasibility of providing additional green waste services.
Other key projects included developing a plan that identified cycling and walking network improvements and delivering an update to council’s website and exploring digital transactions or applications to improve communication and customer service.
Grant District Mayor Kylie Boston said she was excited to complete the document which also included developing a Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP).
“We have not had a RAP so we need to have one and it was something we had talked about for a while,” Ms Boston said.
“Our staff had been talking about it and how it was important and it was something which had been in our last plan and is one of the long term goals.”
She said elected members were excited to include it in the strategic plan with planning starting to happen.
“The strategic plan is put in place now and everything now will align to this as we now work with that in anticipation with some of these great projects and things we have had in there,” Ms Boston said.
“Some of these will get started and we are going to start working on them in this year’s budget.”
She said council would now start to look at the short term goals embedded in the plan and start to talk about the long term goals and what was needed to be done to put them in place.
“I think the feedback was really good and very positive and it helped with structuring some of the wording,” Ms Boston said.
“It was quite interesting where that feedback came with some of the things we had queried as we were going through and doing our review of the document.”
She said having the feedback from the public “cemented” council was on the right track.
“Most of the feedback was constructive and I think that was really good to have,” she said.
“I was pleased to see as much as we had and I think it is great to get that much feedback on a plan because often people choose not to make comments.”
