Barker Ryan Stewart Newsletter – Spring 2018 Edition

Welcome to our newsletter for Spring 2018.
 
The big news for BRS is that our South East Queensland office is now open for business providing our full suite of services to Northern NSW (Coffs Harbour to Tweed Heads) and throughout Queensland. The office is managed by Chris Borg and is located in Broadbeach on the Gold Coast. Please don’t hesitate to contact Chris if you need any assistance with any of your projects located in these regions.
 
Thanks to your support BRS continues to work on an interesting mix of projects. In this newsletter, we feature four recently completed coastal projects located at Dee Why, Terrigal, Coffs Harbour, and Bondi Junction. We enjoyed working alongside our clients to assist in delivering these projects and are proud of our involvement with them.   

The BRS team participated in our 10^th annual two-day conference in September. This year’s theme was “Infrastructure, Innovation, and Technology” and we were fortunate to have Simon Banks, author of “A Thousand Little Lightbulbs” do a presentation/workshop with us. Also, who knew we have a few budding actors amongst us, we were lucky there was no one from NIDA present as they may have encouraged some of us to leave BRS for a career in film and on stage.   
 
Our Senior Town Planner Lisa Wrightson represented BRS at the recent ‘Orange is the New Black’ Planning Institute of Australia Conference.  The conference was held in Orange and focussed on regional planning matters. Lisa did a presentation on ‘Gosford – the forgotten middle child’ to emphasise the importance of the Central Coast as a standalone region that is stepping out of the shadows of its larger siblings Sydney and Newcastle. 
 
We’d like to introduce you to Aron Jaggannath who has joined our Traffic and Transport team and is based in our Sydney office. We are always looking for talented and energetic people to join our growing team, for career opportunities with BRS please visit the “Join Our Team” tab on our website.
 
We hope you enjoy our newsletter.
 
 
Glenn Barker
Managing Director

If you have any queries regarding how we can assist you with your projects based in Northern NSW and SE Queensland, please don’t hesitate to contact our office manager, Chris Borg at seqld@brs.com.au or on 07 5582 6555. 

To learn more about Chris, please click here to view his biography. 

Low Rise Medium Density Housing Code Deferred for 50 Councils

We previously advised of the NSW Government plans to introduce the Low Rise Medium Density Housing Code for all Councils across the State.

Unfortunately, the State Government announced on 6 July 2018 that the Code will only apply to 7 Sydney Councils and the Code will be deferred from release for 47 Councils until 1 July 2019. One week later on 13 July 2018, the State Government deferred 3 more Councils (Liverpool, Penrith, and Bathurst Regional).

The Code now only applies to the following 5 Councils in the Sydney Metropolitan Area: READ MORE.

NSW PIA Conference 2018 – Gosford The “Quiet Achiever”

In September our Senior Town Planner, Lisa Wrightson, had the great opportunity of attending the NSW State Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) Conference in Orange. 

Lisa was asked to present a paper on Gosford and the Central Coast Region, as being the up and coming “quiet achiever” after being overlooked in the midst of the “N-S-W” corridor between Newcastle, Sydney and Wollongong. READ MORE.

BRS Annual Conference 2018 – “Infrastructure, Innovation & Technology”

This year’s two-day conference was held at the Crowne Plaza Hawkesbury Valley. We kicked off the conference with Glenn Barker running through Barker Ryan Stewart’s business plan and our goals for the upcoming year ahead. Following this, our office managers Andrea McDonald, Kim Stamper, Anthony Scott, and Chris Borg led a workshop on BRS’s core values. Ian Stewart then followed with a presentation on the current opportunities in local and state government infrastructure.

After lunch, most people were pushed out of their comfort zones to perform, direct and film an advertisement for BRS. The concept for these ads was by no means serious and brought out a couple of surprise actors among the team. There were a lot of laughs in the filming process and even more laughs watching them back after dinner that night. 

On the second day, our keynote speaker Simon Banks talked us through innovation and technology. This was followed with Garry Ryan workshopping how BRS can implement innovative ideas to better use technology to communicate with each other and our clients, a common theme throughout our conference.  

The team also enjoyed some team building exercises and were given the choice to be treated to some much-deserved downtime at Villa Thalgo Day Spa or 9 holes at the Windsor Golf Course. 

The presentations and workshops provided a lot of great ideas that can be implemented within BRS, and as always it was a great chance to meet with some new faces and to catch up with everyone.