Strategy adopted and implementation planning begins

The Rural Villages Strategy was endorsed by Council on 4 February and work on an implementation plan has begun.

Key actions identified in the adopted Strategy include:

• Future development:
  
  Location of any new development or the direction of future expansion of the villages will be identified in locality plans, prepared incrementally for individual villages. The Strategy also advocates for the regenerative development framework as a guiding principle for any future development in the villages.
  
  The Strategy introduces Planning Principles prepared for "major rural villages" and "smaller rural villages" as identified on the Rural Settlement Map to prioritise implementation of the actions.

• Integrated Trail Network in context of the Rail Trail project:
  
  Review of successful development of the tourist trails in other parts of Australia and overseas reveals that the trails may bring multiple opportunities to the local economy, including creation of jobs in tourism and retail industry, promotion of the region and flow-on benefits for the local producers and entrepreneurs. Successful development of both projects will take time and resources and will require co-operation between the key stakeholders as ultimately, the Rail Trail can become a spine of the Integrated Trail Network.

• Assistance to the local economy
  
  The Strategy includes three groups of actions aiming to facilitate local economic resilience, collaboration and better integration with the broader regional economy:
  
  
  • assistance to small businesses and entrepreneurship in the rural villages,
  • actions aiming to attract creative professionals,
  • actions to promote festivals, activities and events in the rural villages.
  
  These actions are consistent with the actions provided under the Tweed Economic Development Strategy 2014.
  
  Assistance to small businesses and entrepreneurship includes an action advocating for a review of the S94 contributions scheme for traffic-generating development, in order to provide additional incentive for entrepreneurships in the rural villages.

• Village-specific actions: Part 4 of the Strategy provides numerous actions responding to site-specific issues and ideas and includes separate chapters dedicated to each village.