Business Lands Strategic Plan - Coffs Harbour City Council - NSW ...

Coffs Harbour Local Growth Management Strategy
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Examination of Economic and Development Trends. Baseline analysis also included review
of economic and development trends likely to affect prospects in the study region. The
economy is changing rapidly and new challenges are looming – at a broad and local level.
Drawing on the strategy and policy material, any documents supplied by Council and inhouse
consultancy, we prepared a short paper of key considerations from these trends
included in Chapter 2.
Task 2: Supply Side Audit
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Employment Lands Audit. Understanding the nature of existing industry and employment
activities and their associated land consumption and needs is fundamental to this project.
Zoning, cadastre and constrained land GIS layers were provided by Council. Activity (or
vacancies) on each lot were recorded by ANZSIC (Australia and New Zealand Standard
Industrial Classifications) and Broad Land-use (BLC) Category.
Task 3: Demand Analysis
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Economic Baseline and Industry Specialisation. This task will examine the current
economic and industry characteristics of the LGA by location – focussing on the different
employment precincts. Data will be sourced largely from the Transport Data Centre (TDC)
‘Journey to Work’ data sets.
Employment and Floorspace Forecasting. We will use its employment and floorspace
forecasting modelling to identify future growth. The employment forecasts are produced
by taking both economic and population based drivers into account. The supply side survey
material will assist, not only to inform appropriate floorspace ratios, but also of course to
provide a base for ‘projecting from’. Data from the audit will also be used here to convert
employment and floorspace by one digit ANZSIC into broad land-use categories BLCs. This
is important as the BLC have a much better relationship to land-use than the ANZSIC
categories.
Task 4: Consultation
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Stakeholder Consultation. Project stakeholders were consulted to determine their visions
for economic development in the LGA and to understand the nature of activity completed
to date.
Business Focus Groups. Individual business contacts and small focus group discussion were
completed to tease out local market dynamics and issues affecting the development of the
various employment precincts. These discussions were also used as a means to test issues
emerging from the study and to refine draft strategies.
Task 5: Reporting and Refinement
In October 2008 Council commissioned SGS Economics and Planning to prepare an
Employment Lands Strategy (ELS) to identify current and future employment land
requirements for the Coffs Harbour LGA.
The ELS considered both Industrial and Business zoned lands within the LGA. Upon completion
the final draft ELS was presented to Council. As Council and the Department of Planning (DoP)
had previously endorsed an Industrial Lands Strategy (ILS) sections of the ELS concerned with
industrial land was noted but not endorsed as policy, the ILS was reinforced by Council
resolution as Council’s adopted policy for industrial lands.
Business and commercially zoned lands were therefore the focus of the ELS. Several
resolutions of Council endorsed the ELS and associated site specific matters.
Business Lands Strategy – Page 11