What is a Community Plan?

A community plan describes a desired future, goals, strategies and key actions for a local government area. It covers a period of at least 10 years after the commencement of the plan. It is an aspirational plan that articulates the long term future for the local government area as well as strategies to implement the vision. It is effectively a strategic plan at a community level.

A community plan can include the following:

• A preferred future or vision describing how residents see a desirable situation for their community at least ten years into the future,
• A community profile that outlines the demographic, economic and social situation of the community,
• An outline of the main trends, opportunities and challenges facing communities such as ageing of the population, industry expansion, increasing infrastructure demands etc.,
• The identification of broad strategies and goals under a range of topics or themes.
• Key actions to achieve goals and strategies with an associated timeframe, priority ranking and responsible stakeholder and potential partners.

Additional elements of a community plan are often:

• A description of community assets and what people value about their community,
• Actions can include a role for Council such as facilitator, supporter etc. even if another stakeholder is responsible for the action.

While the Local Government Act specifies minimum requirements for community planning, Councils have considerable flexibility. Some options are to develop a community plan:

• that covers topics for their whole Council area as a single community,
• for discrete communities of interest or individual “geographic” communities in their Council area,
• as a combination of topics and discrete communities,
• or with surrounding local government area(s)

The State draft Local Government Act regulations detail that the process for developing a community plan is generally done in five phases of activity:

• an intelligence gathering phase where trends, community profiles, data and forecasts are analysed and documented,
• a community input phase during which citizens and stakeholders describe community concerns and identify priority issues and planning themes for the Community Plan
• a community visioning phase to develop a vision for the future,
• a community validation phase to review the proposed visions and test the underlying assumptions,
• a policy phase in which a formal community plan and strategies and actions and performance measures would be officially adopted by the local council (Queensland Government, 2009).

Community planning processes are to be informed by data and information that provides background and context to the future development of the local government area. For example, the Plan may be informed by major planning documents such as the South East Queensland Regional Plan.

The draft regulations state that Queensland Councils are required to adopt a Community Plan for their local government area by 1 December 2011. However, this timeline has not been finalised and it will be confirmed when the Queensland Government releases the final regulations.

Progress with the implementation of the Community Plan and Corporate Plan must be reviewed at least annually. This would not need to include further community engagement. However, every 5th year, a Community Plan should be refreshed by comprehensive community engagement (Department of Infrastructure and Planning, 2009).

Importantly, a community plan is not a static document. It is a flexible process of continuous improvement. The written plan should be modified and improved based on experiences in implementing actions and to manage changing circumstances.