Director confident change is occurring

Improving process efficiencies, communication and relationships with developers and the community have been the core focus of Baw Baw Shire’s planning and development director Leanne Hurst since she was appointed late last year.

Ms Hurst inherited the Andrew Wegener Consulting recommendations but she was confident change was slowly occurring.

The Wegener review was highly critical of the workforce culture, inefficient processes and increasing backlog of planning applications - all aspects which Ms Hurst said she couldn’t comment on because it was before her time.

“I am assuming it was based on feedback... councillors indicated it (the review) didn’t tell them anything they didn’t know,” she said.

Ms Hurst said her role was addressing the criticisms and recommendations rather than getting bogged down in the numbers.

“My focus has been on the words in the report and where we can improve... then the numbers will take care of themselves,” she said.

The review found that while the service should theoretically be adequately resourced for demand, the team was dealing with a backlog which required additional short-term resourcing.

Ms Hurst said a key to that was the loss of 45 staff from the planning department over the past five years - of which 14 were in leadership roles.

While not commenting on Baw Baw’s inability to retain staff in the past, she said recruitment of planners across the sector was challenging, but slowly council had been filling the vacated positions and additional budget funded positions.

“We are almost at a full complement now in statutory planning and priority development.

“Now we are really focussed on keeping up with applications coming in and putting a dent in the backlog.”

Ms Hurst said at the beginning of September, there were 95 applications in the backlog - seven weeks later that had reduced by one third.

“And we are keeping pace with applications, importantly we are not letting applications go over the 60 days. It’s critical for us to now prevent more getting into that backlog.

“Cutting into the backlog is absolutely important because they are hanging around, which is distressing for applicants,” she said.

She said the numbers were starting to stack up in response to more staff and improved processes.

Over the past two years, planning numbers have increased 31 per cent and applications determined had increased 30 per cent in the same period.

The planning team has reduced the number of outstanding requests from 228 at the start of this year to an average of 30 per month, despite receiving an average of 270 requests per month.

Ms Hurst said there had been a 22 per cent increase in planning applications resolved within 60 days this calendar year. So far in 2022, 206 out of 305 planning applications had been resolved in 60 days (68 per cent). In 2021, the figure was 46 per cent and in 2020 it was 43 per cent.

“We only need a busy month that coincides with vacancies, which occurred in September last year. So we are aware that’s when they will spike,” she said.

The Wegener review called for a “relationship reset” with developers and community members and in her new role, Ms Hurst said one of the first things she did was to meet with those stakeholders.

She acknowledged planners and developers would never always agree, but said it was important they could contact her and managers to work through the issues.

“I’d rather them ring us and say I’m not happy. We now have constructive relationships with most of the developers,” she said.

The Wegener report also drew attention to council’s inefficient processes and use of the TechOne planning data program.

Ms Hurst said an internal business improvement review aimed to improve the program’s efficiencies and productivity.

“There’s no perfect system and there is always opportunities to tweak it...but it is about improving the work flow.

“We have taken the headlines (of the reviews) and imported the strategies to address them - they are ongoing processing and improvements,” she said.

Ms Hurst said the “rebuilding journey” was a three phase approach focussed on process improvements, a recruitment drive and the current phase which was setting new staff for success, moniotirng workflows and shifting performance indicators.