General manager Michael Stretton outlines his plans for the City of Launceston

He said the chance to compete for a role, which was both a major opportunity and challenge, was too hard to ignore.

After almost three months at the helm of the state’s largest council, The Examiner sat down with Mr Stretton to discuss his plans for the City of Launceston.

Local government has always been a part of Mr Stretton’s life.

His father worked in Launceston as a committee clerk in the 1970s, but Mr Stretton’s first role was as a cadet environmental health officer at Sorell Council.

He worked up the ranks, and has spent time at five different councils across Tasmania, two in the North-West, two in the South and Launceston. The broad experience allows you to develop a different mindset, Mr Stretton said.

“You deal with so many elements of the community, and I think it's always interesting,” he said.

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“In Launceston, at the moment, there's so many things going on across a broad spectrum of things.

“You're sort of excited to come to work because you don't know exactly what you're going to be dealing with that day, which I think is a good thing.

“That's really the main appeal for me, is just that variety. I've had already three or four different careers, I suppose you can say, in the sector, through environment health, through planning, through to now as a general manager. I've sort of changed as I've progressed through.”

Mr Stretton firmly believes a council should be run like a business, by doing things as efficiently and effectively as possible.

He said it is important to have a commercial edge to the services being offered.

“We are here to provide the best value to the ratepayers, and it’s not a given that services can continue to increase in progress or scope, without those considerations that any business would make in terms of whether they’re affordable, whether they’re the appropriate level of service for their customers, and those sort of focuses.”

Lean practices are also vital, and it is a whole style of thinking, Mr Stretton said.

“There's a whole range of processes and techniques in terms of how you apply lean practices,” he said.

“It's about identifying waste within your organisation and removing that to be more efficient and effective in terms of what we do.”

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Mr Stetton will have staff use the Dale Elphinstone Simulated Work Environment in North-West Tasmania. It is one of only three lean training facilities of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, and the only facility in Australia.

“[We’ll] create this awareness, and basically give them the ability to identify waste in the organisation as part of their every day. That will be from the top down, and certainly we'll provide basically everyone across the organisation with the training and the ability to participate in that.”

A strong postive culture is a commitment Mr Stretton said he has made to his staff.

“It's a self-driven goal, in terms of what culture we want to work in.

“Basically, the program that I’ll roll out, or the initiative, will say that this is where we are now, this is our current state, this is our future state, and we will develop a range of actions that actually responds to what the staff say in terms of the culture that they want.

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“There’ll be a body of work that happens between the current state to where the future state is. To me, because it's a staff-driven commitment, it'll actually get that buy-in, and everyone’s a part of it.”

Ensuring the Launceston City Deal is delivered on time, on budget, and with “a bang”, is of vital importance Mr Stretton said.

The “huge undertaking” has been resourced and the council will continue to work with major stakeholders, such as the University of Tasmania, to ensure progress is on schedule.

“For me, there's as much an internal focus around making sure that the culture is the way it should be, the financial management plans and the corporate strategy are all aligned, and giving us the best opportunity to deliver on the city deal,” he said.

“Things like the Smart Cities Initiative really excites me. We're going to be leading the country in a lot of respects in terms of what we do there. Basically, we need to make a success of the City Deal, and that will be my main focus.”

Mr Stretton said the council would also review its strategic plan in early 2018.

“At the moment, I want to reaffirm that the greater Launceston plan is the broader, longer-term vision for this region and for this council, and that our corporate strategic plan needs to articulate what the council's role is in delivering the greater Launceston plan.

“We're going to sharpen that focus up to ensure that it is tightly providing us with a direction around what our role is.”

Not many regional centres have an asset like the Cataract Gorge within walking distance to the city and Mr Stretton sees it as a key opportunity.

“I think that we can do a lot more as a community with it as a tourism draw card.

“You only have to look at what's happening in Cradle Mountain to see what opportunities there are, and certainly the level of support from the government to leverage those natural assets.

“That's something that I think over the course of the next 12 months we should be looking at and focusing on.”

Meanwhile, he will continue the council’s work with developers to help them understanding planning scheme requirements and, with plenty of projects on the drawing board, it is a big job.

“Obviously, we've got to be their regulator in the sense that we approve and consider development, but before it gets to that stage, we need to be a resource to be able to help and so that developers understand what the planning schemes are, and what they can and can't do. We're doing that quite well.”