A CRUCIAL five-year period has been rubber-stamped by the Mitchell Shire Council (MSC) as it plots the next five years as part of its mission to meet key goals in the Mitchell 2050 long-term vision.
The MSC Council Plan 2025-29 was up for discussion at last week’s Council meeting, with the opportunity to discuss the strategy across the next five years, including economic growth, good governance strategies, civic pride and continued development of open spaces.
In moving the document, Councillor Bob Humm said he found ‘delight’ in passing the motion, citing building community relations with Council.
“I get delight in passing this motion because as you can see, there are a lot of areas of this that has been worked on with Council over the last 10 months to come up with the vibrant, healthy communities, the working, the learning, the travelling, the shaping of the neighbourhoods and the nature parks, the direction of the objectives of this document. That’s been a really good piece of work in the end run,” he said.
“There are five key factors in it that works through the health, creating local communities and measuring family violence situations that we know we have and involve people in the community, working together as a partnership.
“It’s for that reason that I support this and hope it builds the trust, strength and connections within our community.”
Councillor Claudia James said she hoped the population would continue to take pride in the shire.
“I would like to speak about one of the objectives, and I think it’s the objective that underlies all the others, and that is objective five, fostering civic pride. I think it is extremely important, and I would love everyone who lives in Mitchell Shire to be proud that they live here,” she said.
“For all of us, I know pride in place matters. It builds connections and confidence in our communities.
“There’s nothing better than an attractive and welcoming town centre; it helps people connect and support and is very inviting. It brings people to the town, and it makes people feel it’s a symbol that we are proud of where we live.
“Not only are townscapes important and reflect civic pride, but also valuing what we have. For instance, our biodiversity, our landscapes, our well-developed open spaces, our lifestyle, and we all value the spacious feeling and country town feeling of where we live.”
MSC Mayor Councillor John Dougall vacated his seat briefly to talk about the importance of displaying good governance during the vision’s five-year plan.
“It’s the central document for Mitchell Shire. It’s the number one document. Everything else hangs off this. It provides direction to all of our work. There are five objectives and a whole bunch of initiatives and a whole bunch of strategies in there, but this is the document that brings all of that together,” he said.
“It provides an understanding of the progress that we’re making and perhaps the help we are needing. It challenges us to have those conversations about why that is not occurring and why that has not progressed. It provides us a way of organisational prioritisation, so we said we wanted to do this. It’s not progressing, it provides us the means by which we understand how we can change this to make the progress we said we want to.
“The plan becomes the system for driving budget development. You can’t have a plan that’s not resourced. It is also driving our system for organisational structure, so if we’ve said that we want to prioritise economic development, strategic planning given the growth in the south, and that our planning system needs to be responsive to community needs, then these are the objectives we are setting for ourselves, and so naturally the workforce needs to take form to support that function.
“It also drives the system for organisational accountability. We will measure what we have said and what we have completed, what we need to do to fix that, and provide a baseline for managing things when they go off track.
“It allows us to have the conversations about the tough things that we want to do.”
Thanking the CEO and fellow council officers, who drove MSC through a period of change, Cr. Dougall said their work provided an important backbone to the continuation of MSC’s growth.
“It is a difficult adjustment, it’s a difficult process to go through a whole-of-organisation change, but I have been very encouraged by the enthusiasm, the responsiveness, the transparency of the council officers, led by the CEO, to get on-board this plan. It’s a very significant body of work, and I’m pleased with where we’re at,” he said.
The Council Plan was adopted unanimously by MSC.
