Councils
What did my council actually decide, and what does it cost me? Seven councils sit in this beat, each on a monthly meeting cycle: the coastal core of Lismore, Byron, Ballina and Tweed, plus Richmond Valley (Casino) and Kyogle inland, with Clarence Valley held as an optional southern edge. Each carries live local fights: Byron's short-stay caps and housing affordability, North Ballina retail and coastal flooding, Tweed's rural housing reform as the largest and fastest-growing LGA, and Lismore's CBD rebuild and buyback land-use debate.
We read the business papers, minutes and mayoral reports themselves, not the press-release summary, and set out the decisions on the merits: the budgets and rate variations, the major projects, the planning calls and the money. Councillors and mayors appear through their public roles and the public record, and the region's genuinely mixed political bench is covered on the decisions, never the contest.
Councils
Overland flood studies for Alstonville and Wardell, plus flood function mapping for Ballina. None is about the Richmond: the council's own report says March 2022 flooded urban areas while river flooding stayed relatively minor. One of the three decides how development applications get assessed.
1 October 2026
Councils
The answer was never in the news feed. It is in the business papers: on 22 October 2024 councillors resolved six votes to one not to appeal, on senior counsel’s advice that the four available questions of law had no reasonable prospect. The court fight had already cost council more than $430,000.
16 August 2026
Councils
Line-marking has started at Evans Head and Iron Gates Drive will close. Richmond Valley Council’s own five news items trace a refusal, a developer appeal, a court consent in July 2024, and appeal rights reserved until 31 October 2024. Nothing was published between that day and the notice that construction was starting.
3 August 2026
Councils
The 27 August meeting adopted the strategy, put it on exhibition and directed talks with Mary’s Place and Orange Sky. The resolution straight after it asks the NSW Government for four kinds of funding and, on the fifth point, improved police powers to require rough sleepers to vacate public spaces. Both unanimous, four councillors absent.
28 August 2026
Councils
A new fee on public exhibition funds a pilot program giving Ballina Shire households a lawful place to take small amounts of asbestos, which they do not currently have. The service is capped at 100kg or 10 square metres per customer, so the per-tonne headline is not what anyone pays. Submissions closed Monday 10 August 2026.
30 July 2026
Councils
Four options exhibited, 61 responses plus a 22-landowner submission against the southern alignments, and a hybrid fifth route adopted afterwards at $36.5 million, the costliest of the five.
28 July 2026
Councils
A new pedestrian and cyclist suspension bridge, 160 metres long and disaster-recovery funded, reconnects the Casino CBD to Queen Elizabeth Park and the riverside, restoring a crossing the 2022 floods took. A modest recovery story worth marking precisely because it is finished.
24 July 2026