Commitment to cemetery earns award for Les Hunt

Former Drouin Cemetery Trust member Les Hunt has been recognised for his dedicated service to the cemetery.

Les was a member of the trust for more than 19 years and recently received a framed certificate from the Human Services Department to recognise his service.

Les has been a dedicated and enthusiastic servant of his community through involvement and hands-on contributions with the trust, and now as a member of the ‘Friends’ group since his retirement from the trust.

Asked to give three highlights of his time with the Trust he replied “Just look around. This is a beautiful place”.

Les said the Children’s garden, the development of which he initiated, was something of which he was very proud of.

“I also had the Trust redevelop the front ‘storage building’ into a proper office” which continue to serve that role today.

“And then there was the work with Chris Arnup to build the great gazebo we have in the centre of our cemetery, with room for the large boards that display the names of those buried here.”

After the presentation it was back to work installing a new cupboard in the shed and then some garden work.

Increased activity and demand on Baw Baw Shire’s statutory planning team has been blamed for delays in assessing planning applications.

A quarterly performance report presented to council has shown officers had focussed on clearing a backlog of applications, which meant new applications had failed to be determined with the required 60 day period.

Planning and economic development director Matthew Cripps said increased demand on the statutory planning team due to increased activity in the municipality had put pressure on delivery timeframes.

The report said staff had focussed on determining older applications there were already outside the 60 day timeframe.

As a result the median number of days between receipt of a planning permit application and determination of the application had increased from 82 days the previous quarter to 98 days.

“It is anticipated that this result is temporary and the team will reduce the median number of days as older applications are reduced,”

Of the 132 planning applications received during the quarter, 71 were determined within the statutory required 60 days, bringing the total for the year to 65 per cent.

“The focus this quarter was to determine applications outside of the 60 day timeframe, which will improve council’s performance in the coming periods,” the report said.

Mr Cripps said the shire was one of the fastest growing municipalities in the state and was therefore subjected to high demand for planning inquiries and applications.

He said the assessment of planning applications was impacted by a variety of factors including quality of the application; need to engage with external referral authorities; advertising; and, the complexities of issues.

Mr Cripps said funding assistance from creation of the Latrobe Economic Development Zone had allowed council to actively work to reduce the backlog of applications.

He said planning staff had made significant improvements reducing the number of current applications from 253 to 181 between March and April 2017.

“Additionally, a number of improvements are being made to improve council’s processing of applications as well as working with our clients to ensure the quality of information provided at the outset is complete.

“In 2015/16 year 52 per cent of all decisions were made within 60 statutory days, 2016/17 year to date figures are indicating this has improved to 64 per cent of all decisions,” Mr Cripps said.