Nearly two weeks ago, Lismore City Councillors voted to put a host of documents on public display for 28 days as the start of the new 2025/26 financial year nears.The list of documents is extensive, such as the Community Strategic Plan, the Delivery Program, the Operation Plan, the draft Budget for 2025/26, the Long Term Financial Plan, the Community Engagement Strategy and the Community Participation Plan.While the next twelve months are important to all residents in the Lismore LGA, plans for the next ten years are vital as they require a vision that outlines what Lismore will look like in 2035. This is in terms of population, housing, industry, and the environment.The Lismore App sat down with Mayor Steve Krieg to understand the two long-term documents that deal with Lismore's future growth in a Talking Lismore podcast.In the past decade, for various reasons, Council's Community Strategic Plan (CSP) was not updated; it was simply adopted. So, it was hopelessly out of date, and, as Mayor Krieg said in the podcast, didn't even include a vision statement.The new vision for Lismore is:Lismore, the Heart of the Northern RiversWe envision a vibrant community where everyone has the opportunity to succeed, supported by strong economic foundations for meaningful employment growth and wealth creation in a thriving economy - all while celebrating our culture, fostering the arts, promoting sports and protecting our natural environment.When asked if Lismore is still the heart of the Northern Rivers, Mayor Krieg said he didn't want to judge previous terms of council for their direction, but focus on what he and his team can do during this council term."Our direction for Lismore moving forward over the next three years, left in our term, and hopefully longer, is to see Lismore return to that central heart of the Northern Rivers that we all know."I remember back when the Northern Star was in print form, the big heading that Ballina had overtaken Lismore for the first time in history, population-wise. That was a little deflating, and we've seen through various natural disasters and different events, Lismore has not achieved everything that it could achieve as a city and as a region."So our goal, and if you keep reading through that vision, it was very important to us as a group of councillors to highlight that everyone should have the opportunity for success in Lismore. Lismore needs to return to that place where it is a commercial hub. A lot of things are done online now. We can do all of our banking online, we can talk to our solicitors and those professional-type industries online. But there's still an occasion where you need to be face-to-face. And we want those offices to be in Lismore."We want the state agencies to come to Lismore and set up. We want Lismore to return to that core place, geographically. And I've said it many times since the flood, Lismore is far too big to fail for the state, but in some cases, it's been a little bit too small to warrant that major investment. Well, we're trying to change that. We are trying to generate major investment in the city."We are trying to build a population probably greater than the state average, to be honest with you, because we haven't seen exponential growth in Lismore for a number of decades, sadly. So, I do get excited when developers want to come in and open up housing estates. When we do talk to different companies that want to reform and change the way they do business in Lismore, that excites me, because growth leads to success for everybody in Lismore, whether you are a salary earner that has a property in Goonellabah, or whether you live in Nimbin or one of our other outlying villages."We all complain about the state of the roads. We all complain about the expense of our rates every quarter. How do we tackle those big problems? The simple answer is to encourage population growth. The more growth we have, it eases the burden across the whole LGA. We spread the load."The smaller the pool of people that are here, the bigger the load that everyone has to carry. So if we want to keep all of the nice things, the Memorial Baths, the art gallery, the library, all of those essential services that we all know and love and cherish, we need a greater population to share the load. Otherwise, we're going to be faced with rate rises and the like and increased fees and charges across the board. None of us wants to see that.When asked about what Lismore is famous for, Mayor Krieg talked about our natural wonderlands."We have got some of the most beautiful world heritage-listed national parks on our doorstep. You only have to go 20 minutes out of Lismore, and you can be at Rocky Creek Dam, you can be at Minyon Falls, or Whian Whian. There's places with utmost natural beauty that, unless you get off the beaten track and take the time to explore, you would never know existed."If you look at any of the council's promotions at the moment, it's all about those natural wonders that we possess, the Nimbin Rock, for example, driving out to Nimbin is one of the most beautiful drives in New South Wales. But we don't take the time when we go to Nimbin to actually stop and take a look at that sort of thing. So I think we really want to enhance and encourage our natural assets.""We can't have the most beautiful rainforests in New South Wales if our community don't have employment and don't have jobs, and so we've got to look at how we do business and why we're doing business. At the end of the day, those opportunities are critical to the success, the overall success, of the whole LGA, and we've got to embrace that as a community, and I don't think we have in the past."I think we've found it too easy to be knockers of success. It's the tall poppy syndrome. If someone sticks their head up and does well, we want to chop it off. We actually, as a community, have to embrace people that want to have a go and support them in their journey to succeed."The community scorecard showed three specific areas where council needs to vastly improve its service: they were vision, roads and stormwater."I don't want to sit here and knock previous terms, but our former CSP didn't even have a vision statement in it. So, the reality is we've been directionless for a long time, and recovering from a flood as well has not been easy."It presents new challenges every single day that the broader community are not aware of, and that's in a lot of ways, a good thing. I don't want everyone to be worrying about issues that are beyond their control, but for the general population, every single day presents new challenges to our flood recovery team and to our general purpose."For Council staff and the employees of Rous County Council as well, who are involved in a lot of ways, there are ongoing challenges, but for the first time in a long time, we've actually been able to sit down, take a breath and develop a vision statement to guide where we want to be, and inherent around that vision is providing opportunities for success, and we've got to embrace it. I say it again. We can't knock people for having a go. We've got to build them up. We've got to encourage businesses to come and to set up in Lismore, because that's what's going to provide the employment opportunities for our kids to stay here, to be able to afford to buy their first house in our LGA. That's what we're aiming to do."The Lismore App has covered Lismore roads a great deal over the last four years to give our readers a better understanding of the issues that face council. The LGA has about 1,200 km of road network, 420km of which is gravel. When it rains, water seeps into the existing weak spots on a road creating potholes, which are patched, only for more rain to fall, seep and recreate the same pothole, only bigger and deeper.For council to fix the road network not only takes a huge amount of money and staff, but also a period of no rain. Something that hasn't happened since March this year, until the middle of last week.Mayor Krieg said, "I was only talking about this again this week, we've achieved a lot in the road space that you don't necessarily get credit for, and I accept the fact that potholes are a pandemic in Lismore at the moment. They're everywhere. But it's not just about the roads. Things that haven't, again, been done for 20 or 30 years."While we're fixing roads, we're cleaning drains, because clean drains mean that water is not coming up over the road base and getting into the road infrastructure. So, we're taking a whole new approach."I don't read social media comments too much, to be honest with you, but someone tagged me in something the other day and said how useless I was at fixing the roads, and I take that on the chin. But, this is a whole new way of doing things, because not only are we going to completely restore the roads, but we're cleaning the drains as well, which is a critical piece of maintaining your road infrastructure. It's making sure that water is not getting in and under all of those road bases."For the first time in a long time, in our long-term financial plan, in our yearly budgets, we're actually allocating a significant amount of money into drain cleaning. We've got an urban stormwater management plan up for review, which we are updating as we speak to make sure that our drains are not cleaned once every 30 years, but have a regular maintenance cycle."If we can get through the bulk of the work, then that enables us to then go back and do that preventative maintenance on a much more regular basis, and that will, in turn, protect our road network."We don't want to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars to repair the roads after the '22 flood for them only to fall apart in five years. We need a much broader and different scope of works to be able to make these assets last for their life expectancy, which is 30 to 40 years."Everyone knows Lismore City Council has been battling financial issues for the last two decades. It is a sea of red ink. Not much black ink has been seen on financial statements in that time.Council is forecasting to get back in the black in 2035. Of course, there are a lot of variables in that forecast that could change those forecasts, but is the Mayor comfortable with those numbers and that timeframe?"To be honest with you, and I talk to the executive staff regularly to keep ourselves informed of what's going on, you should never really be truly comfortable in this role. You should always be pushing yourself."One thing, if you look at the budget, for the first time in a long time, is our budget surplus. The minimum requirement is a $200,000 surplus, and we've achieved that in my term and in many, many terms previous to me. Our new finance team has come in, and we've got a $683,000 surplus. To the average household, that's a lot of money. In a council budget, it doesn't sound like a hell of a lot, but it's a step in the right direction, in my opinion."We're not settling for that $200,000 because that's what the OLG (Office of Local Government) tells us we have to have. We're actually pushing ourselves to try and make savings in other areas and to try and reallocate funds to places that it's needed."The long-term financial plan, again, I mentioned the fact that our CSP didn't even have a vision statement in it previously, when I first got elected. We didn't have a long-term financial plan for the council. How can you set direction without having a rough guide of where you want to head? So, as fluid as that document is and subject to change every single year, at least there is a direction, and a vision and a target to work towards, and that's why I am comfortable with that document to answer your question."I make the point that it is subject to change based on variables, but I can hand on heart, say that council is doing everything in its power to give our ratepayers the best value for money that we can. We are looking at savings across the organisation as we speak, as to how we can make some more sustainable economic decisions, and that, again, will impact the long-term financial plan. If we can hit those targets, then that's going to have a more positive outcome and help us achieve that positive cash flow sooner rather than later."You can read all or some of Lismore City Council's documents and have your say in Lismore's future before they get adopted by council in the June 10 meeting. Simply click here for a list of the documents.To easily listen to the full conversation with Mayor Steve Krieg, click Talking Lismore podcast via the App or click here for the website version.