Noosa Cultural Plan 2025-2030 Adoption

Karen Finzel42:24

Thank you I think it's great I think we should finish where we started which was the mission to cultivate a vibrant botanical garden that reflects the community's values working with nature now and for the future so I think it's been a great body of work I think it's great today we're going to now roll on into Paul coming with us with the cultural plan the gardens is very much part of the Noosa Shire story and so we'll just keep building on that moving forward and leaving beautiful spaces for future generations to enjoy and live our legacy so thank you so much today all right we'll take it to the vote all in favour that's unanimous Thank you. We're moving now to item 7.3 on the agenda Noosa Cultural Plan 2025-2030 for adoption and we welcome staff member Mr. Paul Brinkman and we've got Kerri Contini with us as well today. Thank you and welcome. We're excited to hear about this draft coming before us for recommendation and looking forward to hearing your overview.

Thank you, Shaun. I used to go past this site as a school child, riding from Cooroy through to go and slide on the spillway at Lake Macdonald there on some hessian sacks. And it used to be an overgrown dumping ground at the time. And in that short space of my short life, we've seen it develop so much and that's a testament to the volunteers and Council to develop it to this stage. And as Shaun said, it is highly valued in our community for a whole range of reasons. But the question is, how do we continue to improve? How do we continue the gardens going forward if we don't know what people want and we don't have a plan? So I'm very excited and very proud to have developed and present to Council a draft plan for your endorsement, consideration endorsement for the next of public consultation. We have listened to the community, we've done a lot of listening throughout the last year. We have had pop-ups in the park, we've online surveys, we've had stakeholder reference groups internal, we've had external stakeholder groups, and we've had a lot of one-on sessions as well with interested parties, with community groups, with friends of groups and the like, and along the way we've developed various versions of the draft and we've finally come up with a plan which we've put to the various stakeholder groups and we're now in a position that we can present to Council. So as a result of all of that we've found out essentially what people love about the gardens currently. And what sort of things that we should improve on, so a few of the major features of the draft plan, first of all I should say that we created a vision for the plan which was a new vision and it built on the vision that was previously put to Council in 2017, but the new vision is to cultivate a vibrant botanic garden that reflects community values, working with nature. Now and for the future. We think that sets the tone very well for the master plan and under that we have some objectives and some of those developments proposed, so the plan is a 25 year plan, it's not a promise that we're going to deliver everything within the next term of Council or within a set period of time, it's just saying as we develop the gardens in time, these are the types of things we can do and it's not detailed, so if we need to move a pathway, if we need to change things around slightly we can do that, if we need to change the planning slightly later on we can do that, it's really just setting a plan for the future so as Council gets capital money, operational money, can tap into funding. We've got things that we can do within the gardens and develop the gardens according to a plan which is a good thing so the major features of the plan first one was preservation enhancement of our botanic collection which is very important it is a botanic garden improved visitor entry experience which includes a drop-off area we had some feedback around that there was multiple entrances to the gardens and we didn't have that feel of the entrance and it also includes a community facility there was quite a lot of feedback around wanting some sort of commercial offerings teas, like coffees but also places that people can go for meetings and also get information so there is a small community meeting facility within the plan at that entrance feature area. We have primarily accessible grade pathways around the Botanic Gardens so it's the main loops around the gardens so people with accessibility issues can go around those loops. We have activity zones area. Including a playground in the Botanic Gardens as well. At the moment it's separated from the Botanic Gardens to the north end and we have cultural heritage considerations as well so as you will read through the draft master plan you'll see this like there's a whole range of a range of developments and improvements that are planned around all those things and including legibility and signage and other things, education within the plan. So the plans presented for Council's consideration. The next stage if you endorsed is for further public consultation. We'll do some more pop-ups in the park, we'll put some posters out, we'll put it in the paper, we'll put it on online surveys, we'll put it back to the stakeholder reference groups, internal and the external stakeholder groups, and then do some more consultation with each of those individual groups as well. We will then come back to Council, revise the plan, come back to Council again with a summary of that engagement. Of that engagement submissions received, and then hopefully for public adoption.