From the Far End of the Council Table - 21 June 2009
Date: 21-Jun-09
Author: Councillor James Ryan
More big Issues than you can poke a stick at!
Last weeks Council meeting was one of our longest, finishing at about 10-30pm there were so many big issues on the agenda.
The Council barged ahead with the approval of the 908 lot subdivision at Cliftleigh which will add a set of traffic lights to the hill going down to Testers Hollow. As well as the extra 8000 car movements a day from this development, when the F3 is built the traffic along this road will increase by an additional 120% and we can expect queues of up to 200 metres during peak times.
Just up the road Council decided to place on exhibition a plan to rezone land around Avery's Lane for residential housing. This plan excludes the Golf course but includes the Drive In as residential land. Although the Drive In will be allowed to continue for the time being, in my opinion rezoning its land as residential is equivalent to signing a death sentence. It's very hard to imagine a future purchaser paying the full residential value for the land when all they want to do is run a Drive In. I regularly take my children to see movies at the Drive In (I went there as a teenager as well) and the $20 per car is extremely good value as is the family atmosphere of camp chairs, lounges and BBQs. (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is showing from Thursday 16th July.) Not only does it benefit local residents tens of thousands of people from the Hunter and Central Coast visit each year and bring their money to town. When it goes there will be only one Drive In left in NSW.
The Bellbird North Development Control Plan was on the agenda. Sounds boring but this document is the one which determines which area of Bellbird North will be developed first and which ones last. When we are talking up to 4000 houses, which is going to take about 20 years to fill, you can see we need to start in one place and move out progressively. A big issue of concern was the lack of tree planning to screen the vineyards from the suburban development. A lot of Councillors felt that they had been assured the 50m corridors of trees between the vineyards and the urban development would be planted from the beginning so as to be fully grown by the time houses were built that far up. I always think it is important for Councillors to know if everything they have been told will happen, will actually happen!
A developer who wanted more of their land in the first stage of development gave Councillors a presentation before the Council meeting asking for the staging plan to be changed in their favour. Amazingly the majority of Councillors agreed to this without getting further information from staff first over what is a very complex development. Thankfully for a number of reasons the issue will have to be debated again at the next Council meeting and hopefully cooler heads will prevail.
And finally there are next years' rates. Council has been told by the Department of Local Government to fix up its rating structure. Previously Council had created several special categories for Vineyard businesses which operate on rural properties. These businesses are now being charged full business rates on their entire property -needless to say they are hurting. We have to decide that issue next Wednesday!
Make sure you have your say.
