MOST people don't know what a local environment plan is, let alone understand its impenetrable jargon.

An LEP, as it is known, lays down what sort of development can take place in a particular area: houses, flats, shops, industry or schools, parks and open space. It tells you what the zoning is.

Changes in zonings - say from detached dwellings to town houses or high-rise units - are notoriously controversial. The public reaction to such changes often is driven by self-interest.

A small council on a modest budget has been able to demolish, at least partly, the arcane language of LEPs and the knee-jerk "not-in-my-backyard" response to unwelcome change.

Lane Cove council, like all NSW councils, was faced with drafting a new standard-template LEP and, like all Sydney councils, also faced with an ultimatum from the Department of Planning to increase housing densities under the metropolitan plan. For Lane Cove, this means a 33 per cent increase in dwellings in a largely bushland area.

It could have followed the path of neighbouring Ku-ring-gai council, which so stridently opposed higher densities that ultimately the state imposed a worse outcome than could have been negotiated.

Lane Cove took a different route. It decided to negotiate with the department lower densities in sensitive areas - successfully, as it turned out - and to make a real effort to explain the changes, and their inevitability, to ratepayers in plain and simple language.

Residents were enlisted to help in locating the areas to place flats and townhouses and this helped to change attitudes from self-interest to partnership with the council.

In one precinct, the response changed from antagonistic newspaper coverage to home owners organising meetings with developers to find out about development options and financial mechanisms.

Lane Cove spent less than $40,000 - or $3 per ratepayer - on its Draft Local Environment Plan Exhibition (DLEP 2007), which broke new ground in a number of ways, notably the concept of "10 sustainable growth criteria" which guided the plan. Other councils are now considering this concept.