The controversial Ansons Road development project proposal is back on the Agenda.
Dundowran and Craignish residents who protested against the proposed development last year thought the issue was dead in the water. Not so, says Tanya Sanders who has organised a public meeting next Saturday, April 5, 4pm at the Dundowran Hall on Dundowran Road.
Tanya said the previous proposal was never submitted for decision but the developer, Braith Vidler, was asked to provide more information. She said Mr Vidler took 12 months to provide that information for council and now residents have until April 16 to lodge objections.
The original plan included 600 sq metre housing blocks, town houses, shops, a tavern and sporting facilities on a site with no sewerage connection and one access road. Land adjacent to the proposed development in Ansons Road and Sempfs Road is zoned Garden Residential, minimum 2000 sq metre blocks, which cannot be subdivided because there is no sewerage connection. The land proposed for development is currently zoned Emerging Community.
Tanya said Mr Vidler had submitted three alternative proposals for sewerage. The first was a piped connection to the Nikenbah Treatment Plant, the second to provide a large trap on site to collect sewerage and pump it daily into trucks for transport to the treatment plant, the third was to set aside an area of planted land and install a much larger system, similar to the systems now used in the area by individual householders.
Residents worried by the proposal were urged to attend the meeting. Tanya said it was probably the last opportunity the community would have to discuss the issues and lodge objections.
For more information Tanya can be contacted on 0401 356 878.
– The Usual Suspects –
John Neve on his favourite editor:
Nancy Says “We have the canvas to promote arts”, what arts?
The art of selective reporting, the art of looking the other way,
maybe the art of self promotion. Now the election is over, an
election where nearly a third of enrolled voters failed to do so!
Added to which many of those that voted, voted blind due to a
lack of comprehensive reporting.
What is a newspaper about? I thought it was about providing a
balanced insight in to what is going on around us. Not our daily,
it tells us what it thinks we need to know. But now the election is
over, the lid is being lifted. “Staff owed $4.5 million”, “sewerage
plant will have to be replaced in the next few years at an estimated
cost of $20 million”.
None of these issues just appeared, the vandalism, graffiti, budget
deficits, airport upgrades etc. To those who take an interest in
their community, they have been with us for years. But unseen by
our Daily, unreported by our council reporter and ignored by those
“safe hands” Nancy Says will guide us “to discover and share in
building a grand region”.
Perhaps to celebrate April Fools Day, Nancy has come up with yet another example of selecting the facts to support the conclusion she wants.
This morning’s editorial concludes that we had to have amalgamation because of earlier failures to account for some accruing annual costs, such as accululated staff holiday pay.
She is certainly correct in saying that local government is not alone in this accounting error.
I once worked in a University where the head honcho was obsessed with money; unfortunately he wasn’t quite as passionate about education!
Anyway, he was so pedantic that we even had to stash away enough for the occasional year that had 27 pay fortnights in it; something to do with the 3 or 4 extra days in each year.
However, apart from expressing our admiration for such attention to detail, we were left to get on with our teaching, because our fanatic beancounter boss made sure we had an effective budget department which spent its whole life thinking about such things.
With this limited experience, I would therefore seriously question how amalgamation is going to fix Nancy’s problem.
1. How are we going to get a better budget planning performance out of essentially the same staff;
2. Shouldn’t these errors be detected by a more functional auditing code which covers all local governments; and
3. If they stuffed it up with a small organisation, won’t they just make an even bigger mess when they have to run this bigger show?
It’s good people, doing a good job, who are encouraged to learn and improve their systems, in cooperation with each other that creates success; not some externally imposed structural changes which only serve to get people’s backs up.
Didn’t they learn anything from the Bundaberg Hospital scandal? It is just too easy for the culprits to hide their mistakes in these big (dis)organisations.