Published on 21 June 2023
Graham Snow has been appointed as Lismore City Council’s new head of Statutory Planning.
Mr Snow has extensive planning experience working at the City of Gold Coast Council and most recently at Kempsey Shire Council.
He joins Council as it, and every other council across the state, is dealing with a state-wide shortage of planners and the effects of the COVID-19 driven building and renovation boom that has led to delays in development approvals.
“It’s tough to find planners across the state and there is a development boom, which was much the same situation we had in Kempsey,” he said.
“The difference is the shorter timeframes for development assessments in Kempsey and that is because we put efficiencies in place ahead of the boom.
“When I started here, I looked at the average timeframes and Kempsey was about half the time it took to process an application than what is being achieved here in Lismore.
“This is where I am going to take that knowledge from Kempsey and work with the team here to really get something similar happening.”
Mr Snow said the key lesson he learnt at Kempsey was it is all about working smarter.
“Yes, it is hard to get planners, but the State Government is helping with that by offering assistance for cadetships and helping with assessments. But the final piece of the puzzle is to get the team working more efficiently.
“The way to do that is to really challenge how we do things and our workflows, to try and get the most out of the staff and resources that we have.
“Our planners need to work smarter, not harder. They already work hard enough as it is and there is only so much you can do after that point and after that, it really is about finding efficiency gains.”
One of the first things Mr Snow did following his appointment was to reach out to the local industry to discuss previous issues they may have had and how they could be resolved.
“I did the same thing in Kempsey and it really worked,” he said.
Mr Snow has extensive qualifications in planning, earning his Master’s in Environmental and Urban Planning from Griffith University, and having been a full member of the Planning Institute of Australia.
He said the reason he was attracted to work at Lismore City Council was that his wife was born here, in fact she is a second-generation local before moving away in the mid-1980s.
“Family circumstances have brought us back to the region,” the Canadian-born Mr Snow said.
“When this role came up, it was almost like the universe was pulling me in and saying ‘go and do good things for Lismore where your family are from’.”