Kiama is on the dawn of a new era after Council endorsed its much-debated and long-awaited Housing Strategy at Tuesday night's monthly meeting with all but one Councillors voting in favour.

After extensive consultation on Version 2 of the Draft Local Housing Strategy, a motion was moved to endorse it after director of strategies and communities Ed Paterson updated the Councillors on some minor changes from the document that was placed on public display from February to April.

There was further debate on Tuesday night about the Strategy and Councillors indicated they would be comfortable with a community reference group being formed to guide its implementation.

The Strategy confirms Kiama Council will add 900 more homes in the local government area by 2029, to meet NSW Government housing targets.

Councillor Melinda Lawton spoke against an amendment to the motion because there had been changes made at the last minute to add and withdraw certain sections of land that will be available for future housing.

"I'm rather perplexed as to why we can actually change the draft housing document with popping in lands, popping out lands," she told the meeting.

Kiama Mayor Cameron McDonald told The Bugle that the Strategy would set the LGA up for a bright future.

“It's about the future of Kiama for the next 20 or 30 years and how we look and how we want the overall environment to be looking for the future so it’s really important.

“[The Strategy will help counteract ] People in the community being disappointed each time they are confronted with a new development just landing in their laps without having any input into what it potentially looks like.

“[ Without an endorsed Housing Strategy we risk] being dictated to or told that this is where the development will be because the developer would come in and sometimes bypass Council, sometimes by council not agreeing with it [and it goes to court], but essentially were pathways for a developer to ride roughshod over our local community.

“It was an known issue during the Council election for my team to say, look, where do we want our local community to be in the next 20, 30 years with regards to housing growth? And I think that this housing strategy is certainly a major part of our response to that.

“We have been reactionary to some degree in the past. This is a way for us to forward plan and take on some self-determination about where we want to be into the future.

“We don't want to have urban sprawl going out through our green rolling hills and this is a way to define those boundaries and then set some criteria for what the development looks like within those boundaries.”

Cr McDonald added that the Housing Strategy sits alongside an Employment Land Strategy, which will be coming to Council in the next month, followed by a Rural Land Strategy.

Paterson has been working extensively with state government bodies to ensure the Housing Strategy will be complemented by the necessary infrastructure, such as roads, schools, electricity, sewerage and public transport.

He said Sydney Water has a gross servicing document for the Illawarra but Kiama is not on it.

“We're one of the three councils in the Illawarra and we don't show up on their maps. And the reason for that is, prior to having this Housing Strategy, we couldn’t show the state government or any of those agencies that we were going to grow or where we were going to grow,” he said.

“From an agency's point of view if there's not growth on the table or where it's going to occur from a Council point of view, they can't plan for it either.

“So having this Housing Strategy and working collaboratively with those agencies as part of developing it, they're now in a position to start planning.

“Sydney Water have commenced capacity analysis for the entire network and now they'll be able to overlay our Housing Strategy on it and say what other infrastructure do we need to support this growth over the coming decades.”

“I think it's important for everyone to understand that it doesn't matter if it's transport or schools or Sydney Water they're not benevolent agencies. They need business cases to stack up funding from Treasury.”

Cr McDonald added that Kiama Council needed to think “big picture” in the long term.

“There was some comment in the community that the target is 900 houses. How about we plan for 900 and call it quits. But essentially if you took a business case of 900 houses to the state government, it doesn't trigger the investment in the infrastructure that we need,” he explained.

“The Strategy has identified an area of growth and development into the future but as far as what that actually looks like, there are still a lot of conversations to come.”

Paterson added: “By thinking big means that we keep control.

“We're planning for 900 by 2029. Beyond this timeframe the numbers are meaningless and we're just trying to do good planning.”