MOREE Plains Shire Council has been ranked third in NSW for processing development applications in a report by NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure.
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The Local Development Performance Monitoring report compiled by the NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure provides an overview of the performance of the NSW planning system and information on development determined by NSW councils.
Council’s assessment manager Daniel Boyce is pleased with the third place ranking against the other 152 councils in NSW for determining developments with a capital works value of $1-5 million.
“To put this result into context, our staff took an average of 29 days to assess developments in this category, whilst two neighbouring shires took an average of 87 and 201 days.
“This demonstrates council’s commitment to facilitating development in our shire,” Mr Boyce said.
He outlined the importance of making the community aware of the council’s efficient development assessment service.
“There’s a perception from some members of the public that it’s hard to get a development through Moree Plains Shire Council, however, these results show that is not the case,” Mr Boyce said.
“Moree is ‘open for business’ and council is supporting good development,” he added.
The report organises councils into groups based on factors such a geography and population.
Moree Plains Shire is part of group 11 for ‘very large’ agricultural shires with populations of 10,001 to 20,000.
“Our assessment times are noticeably better than many of the councils in our group, some of which have greater resources at their disposal.
“The group average on all developments was 55 days whereas our average was 39 days,” Mr Boyce said.
Now that the council has achieved such good results determining developments with a capital works value of $1-5 million, their attention will focus on a number of other areas for improvement.
“These results show that we are providing a very efficient service, however, we are always looking for further improvement,” Mr Boyce said.
“We’ve targeted new single dwellings and dwelling additions in our residential zones as an area where we would like to improve our assessment times even further,” he said.
