Meander Valley Council's senior town planner has resigned, but a lack of skilled planners in Tasmania means the council expects it will need to re-engage her as a private consultant at greater cost.
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Jo Oliver had worked for the council for 16 years and her resignation was confirmed at this month's council meeting.
She follows other senior council staff members Lynette While and Neil Grose out the door, but the council confirmed the staff changes were not related to a recent restructure. Mr Grose was on a 12-month appointment, and has since joined the Bell Bay Advanced Manufacturing Zone.
Ms Oliver played a key role in implementing the new Tasmanian Planning Scheme.
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Meander Valley mayor Wayne Johnston said the council was accepting of Ms Oliver's decision.
"The reality is that she can actually go out and earn a significant amount more by being a private consultant," he said.
"We may have to re-employ her as a consultant if we can't find another planner. Across the state at the moment there's a lack of planners.
"We haven't lost her, we know that she's going to be out there. We'll just have to pay for it - probably more."
Councils across Tasmania have reported significant increases in development application submissions in the past 12 months - some by up to 40 per cent - and have increasingly turned to private consultants to assess them in order to meet legislated timeframes.
Cr Johnston said councils were often competing against one another for planning resources.
"It's a very competitive environment," he said.
Loss of planning expertise a concern as prison approaches
Ms Oliver would have been critical to the council's work in assessing the state government's upcoming development application for the Northern Regional Prison at Brushy Rivulet.
Westbury Region Against the Prison spokesperson Linda Poulton said it was a great loss.
"We had always contemplated that any application for the Northern Regional Prison would be assessed by Jo and that her experience and knowledge would be invaluable to the council as it attempted to wade its way through the miasma of the application for prison on this completely untenable site," she said.
The group attempted to link the prison proposal to the staff resignations, but Cr Johnston said they were unrelated.
"Jo has never stepped away from a fight with planning. She would probably have loved to have taken a look at the state government's application as it comes forward," he said.
An internal review of council operations by general manager John Jordan was finalised in December and resulted in staff "deployments", with some choosing to take voluntary redundancies instead.
Other outcomes included planned upgrades to the council's IT and accounting systems.