LOCAL GOVERNMENT SUMMIT: Paul Brown loves local government. Firstly, he used to work in one, so he knows a lot about them from the inside. Another reason is the nature of their work.
It’s “very real…very…rewarding”, says Brown, managing director of Ironbark Sustainability.
You could be working on an aquatic centre, a neighbourhood centre or a car park that’s getting EV charging installed – pretty much all they do is directed to helping and lifting the community, he says.
“We’re doing a project at the moment with Darebin Council [in Melbourne], which is focused on how they are going to support their community in things like the EV transition, and how do they manage the conflicting constraints of rate capping, which is reducing their capacity to fund community facing projects, combined with the increasing need that they’re seeing within communities.”
“It’s not theoretical. It’s not ‘should we change this policy mechanism and see what it’s going to do’.”
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Brown’s business was founded 19 years ago on the back of the huge savings that could be made from replacing energy-guzzling street lighting with more efficient models, in some cases up to half a local council’s energy bills.
Today it advises on a much broader range of issues – working on energy related issues for about 100 of the country’s more than 500 councils, including electrification and net zero targets for councils’ own buildings, facilities and vehicles and those of the community. It also handles issues of waste management, water treatment and increasingly, climate risk reporting.
EV charging
In an interview ahead of his appearance at The Fifth Estate’s summit on local government (10 September, Sydney and online) Brown says one of the biggest and fastest-growing items on the local government agenda is the rollout of EV charging.
“A lot of the councils are already on the path to replacing much of their passenger fleet with EVs, so they’re already working through the processes to understand how to put EV charging in their own facilities.”
But how to manage each different charging site and its commercial profile can vary a lot, depending on location and how long ago the infrastructure was installed.
In the early days, councils tended to install chargers as a service to the community. Today, nearly all councils are moving to a commercial model, which can support the rollout of more services.
Brown says most of the advanced EV charging rollout is in dense inner city areas, but regional tourist areas such as Bendigo and Ballarat in Victoria and the Blue Mountains in NSW are particularly advanced, helped in large part too by the influence of motor services organisations such as the NRMA.
Mandatory climate risk disclosure
Climate risk reporting is another big and rising issue.
While mandatory climate risk reporting now applies to big businesses with obligations for smaller companies on the way, local councils also need to report climate risk both for their own facilities and also for their communities, Brown says.
A lot of his company’s work these days is helping councils work out how to meet these obligations and assess risk not just for their own assets but for their communities.
“In Western Australia and Victoria, climate risk is specifically called out as a risk that local governments have to manage and report on,” Brown says, adding that this is specified in their local government acts.
In recent times, the biggest climate cost has come from flooding with stormwater in the first line of impact.
Flood risk alone can put local councils in the hot seat with property owners – do they insist property titles declare flood risk, which existing owners won’t welcome, or do they mandate disclosure to protect prospective buyers?
Brown says councils need to remember they are the planning consent authorities so they can plan well ahead through their zoning rules.
In the case of councils such as Lismore in northern NSW, it could mean planning to move an entire town out of flood zones.
“So, the conflict that we’re exploring right now, where someone gets their land rezoned, such that you can’t build on it, is the unusual case. There’s 100 other actions and 100 other things from a preparation and planning perspective, which councils can be doing now to minimise their risk.”
Long term risk planning can start to avoid those problems from ever emerging in future.
There are local champions, and they can be anywhere
But however difficult the challenge, Brown is energised by the often solitary “champions” working within local government, determined to bring about stronger sustainability and resilience for their communities.
“You never know where those champions will be. So that’s really interesting. They could be in the councils you expect in urban areas, or they could be in the far north of the Northern Territory.
“I think it’s actually an amazing space, an amazing sector to work in, because of the innovation. When you’ve got 500 different organisations all doing different things, then you tend to get great innovation. Local governments are very keen to support and share knowledge across to their peers in other organisations.”
This makes them a great place to test and innovate ideas – and that’s something that state and federal governments could make much better use of, he says.
Paul Brown will share more of his insights at the Local Government, Net Zero and Resilient Communities Summit on 10 September. Lock in your early bird tickets now.