Waikato District Council has this week adopted the Waikato District Blueprint. This is a significant step towards bringing life to Council’s vision of creating “Liveable, Thriving and Connected Communities” – “He noohanga aahuru, he iwi whai ora, he hapori tuuhono tahi”.
Through its adoption of such a meaningful document, Council is telling its community that it is taking a new and different approach to planning.
General Manager Community Growth Clive Morgan says the intent is for the Blueprint to inform a range of Council planning and operational processes, including the Long Term Plan, reviews of district plans and strategies, and day-to-day decision making within existing programmes and budgets. “For this to occur, it was important to ensure that the Blueprint is an accurate reflection of the community’s priorities.”
Keeping this in mind, the drafting of the Blueprint has been a co-design approach between Council and the community, Mr Morgan says. “We’ve had great community support in getting the Blueprint to this stage and I want to thank the community for their input and desire to see this new vision of creating a greater Waikato district come to life.”
Having a clear sense of the community’s priorities will now help direct Council’s resources towards the things that are really important to the community.
In developing the Blueprint, workshops were held in 10 of the district’s townships between July and November 2018. Council heard from hundreds of members of the public about what issues and ideas they had for their towns. Council then issued a draft Waikato Blueprint for consultation in March of this year. During this consultation, submitters were asked to indicate their top five district wide priorities and their top three priorities for each of the Local Area Blueprints. In total 439 submissions were received.
The implementation phase of the Blueprint is scheduled to begin at the end of July 2019. The first step will be implementation planning. Additional Local Area Blueprints are also planned to be developed for Newstead/Eureka, Gordonton and Port Waikato. Other areas also may be considered over time.
ENDS
What is a Blueprint?
The Blueprint is a high-level ‘spatial picture’ of how the district could progress over the next 30 years, address the community’s social, economic and environmental needs, and respond to its regional context.
For more information please contact:
Teresa Hancock
Communications Advisor
Waikato District Council
027 706 5776
communications@waidc.govt.nz
