Eleven large urban fringe Councils from around Australia are taking part in a ground breaking benchmarking project. By documenting their best practice achievements in a particular area of Council activity, knowledge and problem solving is being shared across Australia.
Councils participating in the project include Pine Rivers, Caboolture and Redland from Queensland; Wyong, Liverpool and Blue Mountains from NSW; Casey, Whittlesea and Yarra Ranges from Victoria; Noarlunga from South Australia; and Gosnells from Western Australia.
Under this unique project, each Council has the responsibility for documenting one of the following specialist areas.
- Development Applications and Building Applications
- Complaints and Requests
- Libraries
- Infrastructure Planning
- Plant Utilisation
- Human Resources
- Geographic Information Systems.
The Councils have now completed draft outlines covering their processes and systems. These have been collated and distributed to all participants for feedback and fine tuning. The host Council, Pine Rivers in Queensland, through John Kleem Consulting will run training workshops for participants during June. To be held in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, it is expected that up to 10 staff members from each Council will attend.
“The project promises to be a pathfinder in Australian Local Government and is already attracting enormous interest,” John Kleem said.
Efficiencies will be realised with each Council concentrating their efforts in their nominated specialist area to achieve best practice and then sharing this knowledge and expertise, firstly with their benchmarking partners and then other Councils across the nation.
For further information on this Benchmarking Project contact
Russell Garskett at Pine Rivers Council, telephone (07) 3205 0555.
