Planning for Lismore's Future

Lismore City Council is developing a new Community Strategic Plan.

The Community Strategic Plan is part of the NSW Government’s Integrated Planning and Reporting framework and all NSW councils are required to develop these plans to guide their long-term direction.

The Community Strategic Plan is a 10-year document which clearly sets out the community’s vision for the future and articulates how local people want our city, villages and rural areas to look in the next decade.

Council is required to develop this Community Strategic Plan but we are not responsible for the delivery of all of it. For some aspects we are a Service Provider. For example, water, wastewater and rubbish collection. For some aspects we partner with other organisations and for some aspects (such as transport, health and housing,) we advocate to other levels of government for better services in our Regional City.

In order to create this plan, we undertake extensive community consultation to confirm our community’s aspirations for the future. The Newsfeed function below provides details on what engagement has taken place so far.

Further updates on the development of the Community Strategic Plan will commence after the September 2021 Local Government Elections.

The draft Community Strategic Plan will go on public exhibition in May 2022. Click on 'subscribe' on the right hand side of the page and we will email you when the documents go on exhibition.

We started the community consultation activities in early 2020. However, a lot of this needed to be put on hold due to COVID 19.

To date, consultation activities have included a Community-wide online survey (November 2019 to February 2020,) six face-to-face workshops at local community halls (February 2020,) a session with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community members, with young people at schools and with members of our senior population in February 2021.

These activities provided Council will excellent ideas and feedback from a cross-section of our community.

We then summarised what you had told us so far and asked the community to complete an on line feedback form on Your Say Lismore. The aim of this was to check back in, to find out if the same things were important to others within the community and to see if anything had changed as a result of the year that we’d had.

This feedback period ran from late March to 3 May 2021.

To the right is the life cycle of this project which details the steps we take when developing the Community Strategic Plan and the other Integrated Planning and Reporting documents. As you can see, next steps in this process will be for Council staff to collate all feedback from the community consultation exercises to present to the newly elected Council.

In late 2019, Council began reviewing and evaluating its current 10-year Community Strategic Plan.

Council engaged with the community to identify people's main priorities and aspirations for the future and to plan strategies for achieving these goals. This information was to be used to develop a new Community Strategic Plan.

The community consultation to inform the new Community Strategic Plan took place in early 2020 and was combined with community consultation to develop a new Local Strategic Planning Statement. This is a strategic document looking at land-use planning and development controls.

Hundreds of people gathered together across the region in community halls to discuss these two plans and provide Council with important feedback and ideas. We also ran an online community survey and provided an online space for people to share and submit ideas.

Then in March 2020, COVID-19 came along and the world changed. The local government elections and the development of the Community Strategic Plan were postponed for 12 months.

The Local Strategic Planning Statement was adopted by Council in 2020.

What’s new or changing?

• The Minister for Local Government has announced that the September 2020 local government elections will be postponed to address the risks posed by the COVID-19 virus.
  
  

What this mean for the review of the Community Strategic Plan

• The postponement of elections has implications for the activities councils may be required to undertake in the current and next integrated planning and reporting (IP&R) cycles. This means that the review of the Community Strategic Plan will be postponed until 2021. The Office of Local Government will be providing further detailed guidance to Council's on this and other changes to statutory timeframes that may become necessary as a result of deferring elections. When this occurs we will update this project page.
• The feedback the community has provided us to date will not be wasted, as we will continue to engage and check back in to see that what you have told in during the consultation activities is still current.