YOUR front page article ‘Lyall Road tick’ by Jade Lawton in the previous Gazette (6 October) contains a lot of wishful thinking. The outcome she reports is quite different from my memory of what the council decided, which was: to set up a committee to try for yet another attempt to negotiate with the developer (though what purpose this would serve is a mystery). Was Lawton’s report perhaps written before the meeting that it reported on?
What actually happened was that the council passed a motion by Cr Aziz with the intent just mentioned. Does the council usually ‘negotiate’ with applicants when it refuses applications? The idea of ‘negotiating’ with the developer reveals the council’s lack of resolve. The negotiations will be from a position of weakness, and have no hope of reducing the planned development down to acceptability. What will the council do then?
The council has a very good case for not negotiating, and upholding the 173 agreement. This seems to be the only avenue open to it at this stage to stop the development, and this is precisely what it should do. It is not difficult, it just requires the will. But there was no discussion of the many serious objections to the development, none of the actual cost of opposing a possible Supreme Court challenge, merely assertions (unproved) that the council would lose such a challenge and that the cost would be too high; no recognition that the Supreme Court had already found against this developer in a different case in Berwick.
What the council needs to do is show some real backbone. The proposed development is totally unsuited to Berwick, and would set many precedents which would cause the council much anguish in future applications, at greater ultimate cost to the council. There are so many reasons for this development not to proceed. The council needs to stop being weak, and stop vacillating, afraid of exercising its own authority, and to reaffirm its stated policies on building height, amenity, parking, traffic, and heritage.
As for VCAT, it has landed Casey with the costly social disaster of Brookland Green, and now the problems of Lyall Road, Berwick. If the development takes place, Berwick will soon be disfigured with other similar buildings and traffic congestions, and its quality as a place to live will be sadly diminished. If we go down that track, the problems of the future are so much greater.
John Miller,
Berwick.
