Councillor Don Palmer Providing Local Leadership & Working for You

The new committees at Unley kicked off this week firstly with the first meeting of the Infrastructure & Capital Projects (ICP)Committee. The Development Strategy and Policy committee (DSP) last night had a workshop ahead of it’s first meeting next Monday night.

And last week the restructured Unley Business & Economic Development (UBED) committee had its first meeting.

The two start up meetings for ICP & UBED were basically a let’s get acquainted meeting and an opportunity for all members (independent & elected) to have an understanding of what Council sees it has ahead of it in the foreseeable future.

UBED (of which I am a member) got off to a good start with great participation from the independent members as we recommended budgets be approved by council for each of the main street associations. These associations are all represented on UBED.

The ICP kicked off at the beginning of the week chaired by my co-councillor Jenny Boisvert.

Our General Manager of Infrastructure gave a solid briefing to this committee of what he sees as the way forward and I have to say I am really impressed by his knowledge and his perspective, which unfortunately did not exist previously. The members did not contribute much on the night but I am sure they will when they get stuck into the meaty stuff.

I was pleased to hear an acknowledgement of something I have being saying for some time now and that is we need to seriously challenge our concept of the life of an asset. This committee acknowledged this on the night and has the expertise to do this as they truly have an understanding of the sorts of assets we have, unlike I feel our previous administration.

Last night the DSP of which I am also a member had a workshop, again to familiarise ourselves with the program of Development Amendments we have going forward and to forewarn that we have a Section 31 to attend to. It was a briefing also to prepare us for the first committee meeting next Monday night.

This committee will be hearing on Monday night presentations by persons who have made representations to DPA 3A, which Council must finesse and approve before sending back to the Minister (see previous blog posts on this site) for his final approval. I will report more on this next week.