Phillip Priest

Phillip Priest has over 20 years experience in urban planning within the Victorian local government sector .  He has held a variety of statutory and strategic planning roles with a range of Councils, gaining experience of planning issues apparent in urban, urban fringe, rural and coastal environments.  A large part of his career was spent at the City of Melbourne managing complex and large scale redevelopment projects and developing masterplans for some of the Melbourne's major schools and institutions, whilst also acting as the Council's planning coordinator for the Melbourne Docklands.  Phillip is passionate about the virtues of town planning policy and practice in delivering quality built form outcomes within our physical environment. 

For the past 7 years Phillip has managed the urban planning and more recently building functions at Moreland City Council.  Phillip's team has turned around the performance of the Council's planning functions with a drive for well prepared and realistic planning applications at the outset and a focus on making a decision.  In the initial years the number of outstanding applications was reduced by almost 50% and Council now enjoys a more manageable workload for officers and a very high resolution and success rate before VCAT, further  encouraging the team that Moreland makes good decisions.