Building Our Regions

A $200M program to boost Queensland economy.

Overview

Building our Regions Regional Infrastructure Fund (Building our Regions) is a targeted infrastructure program for local government projects.  The program forms a key element of the Queensland Government’s overarching economic strategy –Working Queensland.

Background

The Queensland Government is investing $200 million over the next two years in critical regional infrastructure through the Building our Regions program.

The Queensland Government is committed to providing funding for critical infrastructure in regional Queensland that meets the specific needs of regional communities and supports economic development, including job creation.

Objective

The primary purpose of Building our Regions is to provide funding for critical infrastructure in regional areas of the state, while also supporting jobs, fostering economic development and improving the liveability of regional communities.

Funding

Funding of $200 million is available for the program over two financial years – Round 1 2015-16 and Round 2 2016-17 (i.e. $100 million per year). There are four focused infrastructure funds under the program.

The three funds which are managed by the department include:

1. Regional Capital Fund ($70 million over two years)
2. Royalties for Resource Producing Communities Fund ($55 million over two years)
3. Remote Communities Infrastructure Fund ($15 million over two years).

The fourth fund is the Transport Infrastructure Development Scheme (TIDS), which includes an additional $60 million in funding over two years.

Eligible Projects

Local governments should submit projects that are critical to the functioning of a community, where delivery of the project (or failure to deliver the project) will have a significant impact on the community’s prosperity and wellbeing.

Local governments will be required to provide substantive evidence of the demand or need for the project, including the consequences of not addressing the issue, as well as evidence that the proposed project is an appropriate response to the identified demand or need.

Projects that fall into the categories of community, flood mitigation and transport infrastructure will be considered for funding.

Community infrastructure projects may include:

• water, sewerage and waste water, landfill, recycling
• social (e.g. health, education)
• economic development (e.g. headworks on local government owned industrial land, commercial/tourism precincts).

Transport infrastructure projects may include:

• airports
• marine infrastructure
• road projects – road projects submitted must have already been considered, but not funded, through TIDS. Due to the availability of increased TIDS funding, roads applications generally will have a lower priority.

Flood mitigation infrastructure projects may include:

• levees
• drainage works
• causeways
• road works specifically required to address an identified flood mitigation requirement

Eligible Applicants

Building our Regions is focused on enabling the provision of critical infrastructure in regional areas and is therefore only open to regional local governments. For the purposes of Building our Regions, this includes the predominately non-urban local governments of South East Queensland (Lockyer Valley, Scenic Rim and Somerset Regional Local Governments). Eligible local governments have been allocated to one of three new funds and are eligible only under that fund.

Timing

Applications for Round 2 of the program open 4 April 2016.

Round 1 Recipients

To view the complete list of the recipients, click here.

More Information

• Source
• Building our Regions FAQs