G'day. I'm Digby Rayward, the Mayor of Dungog, and I'm pleased to present this week's Council Connect. Let me tell you, as usual, there's a lot happening! There's plenty of road work being done, and you'll see the guys have been spurred on by the recent rain events. Congratulations to those teams; they really are doing a great job. We did have some damage from that rainstorm event, but the guys are on top of it.
Bringing you up to date today, I hope you're aware that Council received a grant of just over $1.8 million for strategic planning across the whole of the Shire, and the first part of this spend is on the Clarence Town Structural Plan and Streetscape and a Flood Study.
This plan is a vision for the next 30 years. Don't look at it and think, oh, geez, how does it affect me in the short term? When you look at it, think about what's Clarence Town going to look like in the next 30 years? Where is the housing going to be built? What will the whole district look like? So get your mind around that, get involved, and have a look at the draft plans and have an input.
The second and final information session will be next Tuesday afternoon at Clarence Town School of Arts, from 4.30 – 6.30pm. Don't miss the opportunity to engage. I keep saying the community is the most important thing we have, and this is your opportunity. Don't miss out.
There's also a flood study. We're asking for input from locals who have actually been involved with the floods. We'd like you to put in your own personal experiences of where the flood levels got and how high they were. So this is important, some real truthing. So get involved with that. You can see all this stuff in the plans online if you haven't already, or at the Dungog Admin Office or the Clarence Town Post Office. So get involved.
The further $1.8 million will include the rural land strategy, which is an important document, and then extend to further areas of the Shire. So watch this space. The planning guys are doing a lot of work, and the consultants have been engaged, so that's good for the future.
The upcoming federal election has seen us lobbying hard for extra funds for our road networks. Certainly, recent studies have shown that small regional councils are not sustainable without changes at the government level. The cost shifting is causing us havoc and is having a negative effect on our budget, and not only our budget but all small regional councils. A simple example of this is when the government decided that their government auditor would look after all Council business. This has added a huge cost to council, and it's reduced the competition in the space. Anyway, we're working on that. Also an argument we're putting up is the distribution of allocated money from the federal government called a Financial Assistance Grant. So that bucket of money comes into the NSW Government, and then it's distributed to the councils. And we've been arguing for a long while that that distribution is not equitable to small councils, and the bigger councils are getting more money than they should, we think, and we want it redistributed equally, so that these smaller councils with less population but more roads, get a fair go. We've been on this for a little while, and I think we might be getting some traction on our argument, but we don't want to be overconfident.
As you know, Council has been looking for Expressions of Interest for a caravan park in Dungog. This has been a big push by the community, and so that Expression of Interest is now going out, so let's watch this space and see what unfolds. The ultimate decision is whether a developer actually considers it a worthwhile investment, and that will be up to them, but we will be working with whoever throws their hat in the ring and see if we can move this forward.
Now, finally, there's been a lot of interest in setting up a Park Run in Dungog. When I could run, I used to go in the park runs. They are great, they are very popular in towns, and they bring in the tourists as well. So we may be able to do this with the support of the Chamber of Commerce. So anyone that's interested in being part of the development of the park run, watch this space because we need about half a dozen people on a steering committee, and we need to get this off the ground. So those that have an interest in Park Runs, if you can let the Chamber of Commerce know, or me, or Council and we'll try to get a group to get it going. We just need a 5km course.
That's enough from me for the week. Take it easy, and someone will talk with you next week. Cheers.
