Major Project Updates

Keep up with some of Council's major projects with these quarterly updates.

Council is undertaking a 12-month food organics and garden organics (FOGO) trial in collaboration with our Waste Management Partner.

Over 600 households and a small number of businesses in parts of Woodside and Lenswood will trial the new kerbside bin collection systems. This includes a new FOGO bin for rural households and a change in the collection frequency of organics bins and landfill bins, which aims to improve the food waste diversion from landfill.

Delivery of the FOGO trial has continued and is on track for completion in October 2024 following which a report will be provided to Council exploring outcomes and providing recommendations for the kerbside bin services.

The FABRIK Development Project involves upgrading and enhancing the former Onkaparinga Woollen Mills site at Lobethal to create an arts and heritage hub in the central Adelaide Hills.

Works have progressed well in spite of a number of delays with the building works to be completed in August.

Further landscaping, wayfinding, installation, and establishment of the retail pavilion will occur following completion of construction. The new hub is scheduled to open in September.

Funding has been provided to enable the purchase of approximately 12 electric vehicles during 2023-24 as well as installation of the supporting charging infrastructure.

All Electric Vehicles (14 in total) have been delivered.

EV chargers have been installed at the Woodside office, Stirling office and Heathfield depot and are now operational.

The project was successfully completed.

In July 2023, Council adopted an implementation plan based on the “Our Watch Toolkit for Local Government”.

The aim of the toolkit is to prevent violence against women and their children through a range of strategies including those with an organisational focus. This is followed by work with the community to raise awareness and to undertake population based prevention activities.

Outcomes from the Workplace Equality & Respect Employee (WER) Survey completed in April, the WER focus group conducted in May and the Workplace Gender Equality Data Analysis have informed the final recommendation report created by Our Watch Institute (OWI) received by the administration in June 2024.

We will be using the recommendations from this report to create the new Gender Equality Action plan.

AHC received an honourable mention for this project at the 2024 National Awards for Local Government.

Following on from the Community Resilience and Readiness pilot, the program has evolved to focus on community led emergency preparedness. The name of the program also changed to be Toward Community Led Emergency Resilience Program (TCLERP).

The program has several areas of focus including:

• Community Engagement
• Psychological and emotional emergency preparedness community education
• Recovery ready halls project – emergency preparedness for select community facilities
• Vegetation management project – ensuring practices are based on best fire science and within shared land owners existing capacity

• The Towards Community Led Emergency Preparedness project won the LG Professionals Excellence in Emergency Management Award.
• Communities that have completed RediCommunities workshops continue to be supported by the Community Resilience Officer to realise community led preparedness intiatives.
• The final report for the Recovery Ready Halls project (funded through the Black Summer Bushfire Recovery grant) was submitted, successfully acquitting the grant.
• All activities funded through Wellbeing SA's partnership agreement were completed this quarter. The final report is being prepared and is due for submission in July 2024.
• The Disability Inclusive Emergency Planning (DIEP) Forum was held in April in partnership with the University of Sydney. A final report with learnings from the forum has been prepared and shared with participants, which included people with disability, carers, representatives from state government agencies and emergency, community, disability and health services. A range of forum participants also participated in a follow up tool testing day with Professor Michelle Villeneuve from the University of Sydney, designed to support organisations to improve their ability to support emergency preparedness for people with disability.
• The Landscape Management Project Officer has commenced work on a fire track audit process after being successfully awarded funding through the South Australian Disaster Risk Reduction grants program. The initiative was flagged in the Bushfire Landscape Management Strategy.
• The Community Resilience Team have been selected to present about their work at the Australian Disaster Resilience Conference in Sydney in September 2024.