Mayor column: with Cr John Harvie

Published on 07 May 2026

At the March Ordinary Meeting, council supported my motion to form a Mayoral Taskforce to examine and review council’s planning and building services. Taskforce members are myself as chair, Cr Geoff Wise, Cr Gen Campbell, Cr Gary Pappin, CEO Stacy Williams and Director Sustainability and Growth, Bryce Kilian.

The formation of the taskforce is a genuine and collaborative attempt to examine and improve council service levels and will also include scrutiny of the NSW Planning Portal and State Environmental Planning Policy (SEPP).

The objectives of the taskforce are:

1. To identify and review issues that negatively impact the quality of development services provided by council.

2. To examine available evidence and data, and benchmark council’s performance against industry standards.

3. To develop a plan of action to address any identified issues affecting service quality to ensure that the Murray River Council area remains an inviting place to live, work, invest and do business.

The taskforce will encourage input from staff and will also seek submissions and face to face input from people and organisations who use council’s planning and health and building services including planning consultants, builders, developers and members of the public.

The taskforce has a limited tenure and will submit a report of its findings and recommendations to council in November.

You may, from time to time, read or hear about situations where council has approved development applications where the officer’s recommendation is to refuse consent. These situations occur because there are elements of council’s Local Environment Plans (LEP’s) and Development Control Plans (DCP’s), which officers use to help determine their decisions, that require updating and do not currently reflect the views of your councillors.

Therefore, council has commenced work to combine the Wakool Local Environment Plan 2013 and the Murray local Environment Plan 2011 to produce a new combined Murray River Local Environment Plan. This will standardise planning and development requirements across the MRC region.

Once approved, council will begin making changes to the new document to reflect current community expectations. This may seem like a round-a-bout way of producing a new document, but it is in-fact the quickest and easiest way to circumvent a very long and difficult process. (Commencement of combining the two LEP’s was announced in 2020 but was never finalised).

At the same time, the Development Control Plan will be updated making building and development controls reflect community expectations and councillors and officers will agree more on planning decisions.