SMARTFORMS: Honouring our commitment to cut red tape
At the last election I gave you, the voter, my personal commitment that I would fight the excesses of bureaucracy and red tape at Holroyd City Council -- this was at a time when Holroyd had been branded the second slowest council in NSW by the Department of Planning.
Since then Holroyd has implemented a development fast-track team to get the simple applications (business signage, carports, driveways etc.) out of the road so that the Council can then get on with the job of chewing away at the backlog of developments applications which have sat on the backburner. And as much as I’d like to take the credit for it, the real kudos goes out to a Council officer by the name of Greg Raft who in his role as Council’s Director of Environmental and Planning services has worked to turn around the culture in his department. Under Greg Raft doing business with Council has become both friendlier and more efficient.
Now is the time to build on that foundation and recommit ourselves to simplifying the maze of red tape that still exists. In today’s economic environment we need to do everything we can do to make Holroyd attractive for people to do business here. The competition for investment dollars has never been so fierce.
That’s why at the last Council meeting I brought motion CCL295-09 to the floor of the Council chamber for debate. This motion will put red tape simplification and reform back on the agenda by examining how Council can use extising initiatives such as SmartForms (and their competitors) to help simplify the red tap process involved in doing business with Council.
One of the time-saving benefits of SmartForms is that it will automatically adjust itself to cater to an applicant who selects the box that says they’re and individual so that they don’t need to skim through all the fields which only apply to business applicants or government departments. SmartForms tailor themselves to fit the individual user instead of imposing a generic one-size-fits-nobody approach.
It also means that small-businesses will be able to do business with Council on their terms, rather than leaving their day-to-day operations to visit the Council on Council’s terms -- during their hours of operation, their queues and their time-delays.
I hope that by putting red tape back on the agenda that we can generate the ideas needed to make our local area an attractive place to invest and get Holroyd moving again.
