As expected, the long awaited Planning Scheme Review, will NOT BE REVIEWING THE RESIDENTIAL ZONES as demanded by so many residents! Nor does the proposed work plan fill us with confidence that the municipality overall will greatly benefit from what is mooted – especially when suggested time frames go out to 4 years down the track. In this first of our posts we simply summarise sections of the suggested work plan and the stated time for completion.
Structure Plans – Complete first 3 within 4 years. Ongoing, continue with structure plans each taking 1-2 years to complete. (Comment – given that there are 10 Neighbourhood centres – that is a time frame of between 10-20 years!)
Neighbourhood Character Policy – 2 to 3 years.
Heritage Internal Review – 3 to 12 months
Heritage Major Review – 2 to 3 years
Municipal Strategic Statement – 1 to 2 years
Local Planning Policy Review – 2 to 3 years
Development contributions levy – 2 years
Parking Provisions – 3 to 4 years
Open Space – 2 to 3 years
Sustainability Policy – 2 to 3 years
Water Sensitive Urban Design – 2 to 3 years
Transition between zones – 2 to 3 years
Special Building Overlay – 2 to 3 years
Tree Protection Policy – 2-3 years
COMMENT
We acknowledge that due to council’s failure to act on planning issues for the past decade, there is now a huge backlog of work that is required. Having said that, residents should not be prepared to sit back and wait for another 2 to 3 years for changes to eventuate. The Minister’s directive to start work came in December 2015. Exactly what has council done in the past 8 months? How much money has been set aside in the budget to hire consultants to undertake the necessary work? How much of the upcoming work will remain ‘internal’ and secret – such as this statement from page 106 – Glen Eira has completed its review of the new residential zones. Though some community feedback is calling for Council to review the residential zone boundaries, particularly at ‘transition areas’ where two different residential zones meet, it is prudent to wait for the State Government to release its findings before any decision is made about reviewing our own locations.
And if council is so overwhelmed with the task ahead, then there is always the alternative of pinching what other councils have already successfully introduced into their planning schemes. Tree protection is the perfect example. Why this should take 2 to 3 years is laughable and says much about the underlying intentions of this council and its inept planners and councillors.
Glen Eira Debates 
August 5, 2016 at 2:28 PM
Your comments are spot on, this is just years of inept management now taking its final toll. Our new CEO should clean deeper into her rank of sleepy self serving bureaucrats cleaning out the non performers out of the planning department would be justified.
August 5, 2016 at 4:27 PM
There’s always an excuse to try and explain away why council does not act. They have to wait for government to produce their reports is the classic example. Refusing to looks at the zone boundaries is the latest use of this excuse. Council then can wait and wait and when nothing happens they turn around and blame government. I know for a fact that other councils aren’t waiting. Four years to do something about parking is frankly a dereliction of duty. This council has been derelict in its duty to residents for as long as I can remember. The planning scheme is full of proposed further strategic work that has not been done much less even discussed. With this record, I don’t believe any of their promises now unless every single councillor is removed and an entire new planning department is introduced. I’m sick of being promised that things will change only to find years later that they have got worse. Waiting four more years for any change is too late. Suburbs will be devastated even more than they are now.
August 5, 2016 at 6:59 PM
Derelict and negligent are good words to describe this council. What I don’t understand is why and what there is to gain in delaying and delaying. Here are some ideas and I’d like other people’s opinions on this –
1. More apartments means more rates
2. No skill in the planning department to do what is required
3. No money to pay for professional advice
4. Changing too many things means admitting we were wrong all along
5. A gung ho mentality that wants more and more development from Magee, Lipshutz, Hyams, Delahunty, Ho, Pilling, Esakoff and even Sounness. Lobo is a question mark on some things
6. Torres running the show carries on the Newton agenda
7. The new ceo won’t stick her neck out and could also be very much in favour of uninhibited growth for all we know
8. Fearful of developer backlash and the loss of friends
August 5, 2016 at 5:58 PM
So they have pretty much ignored the Minister of Planning’s directions and concerns.
“I would like to see this review focus heavily on the adequacy of planning provisions for its activity centres. This may necessitate Council carrying out further strategic work in these centres to develop a suite of planning controls which respond appropriately to the intensity of development which is occurring in and around these centres.”
“The purpose of this meeting will be for Council to outline its process for reviewing its planning scheme, its planning provisions relating to activity centres and how it intends to manage growth in and around these centres.”
August 5, 2016 at 6:40 PM
I volunteer my 13 year old son. He could whack together a pretty good tree policy in about 15 minutes after he reads what other councils have done. He would be cheap too. A Big Mac is all he wants. I should tell him to apply for director of strategic planning at Glen Eira. Couldn’t do any worse than what is there now.
August 5, 2016 at 7:01 PM
The Officers Report fails to highlight a critical theme – urgency. The opposite has actually occurred – no hurry! As an example, it is recommended that three structure plans be completed in four years time. What’s the point then? The Officers Report also fails to document the community feedback on the draft work plan which included – after years of inaction, get it done now!
August 5, 2016 at 9:50 PM
Resident comments on the have your say council site are gone. Not gone are age old consultations like the walking strategy from 2013. Shows the priorities of this council plus making sure that what they claim people have said can’t be checked up on. Excellent transparency.
August 6, 2016 at 7:52 AM
Parking has been a bugbear for years and council has known this. It is adding salt to the wounds to say that doing anything about this problem is going to take another 3 or 4 years. This is not a planning scheme review. It is another excuse for doing nothing.
August 6, 2016 at 9:35 AM
Four years that’s about a paragraph a month, that’s good going for your bog- standard bureaucrat.
It take a bloody long time to run it through the spelling checker, walk it upstairs to the few hundred paranoid spin doctors gainfully employed. They then have to consult all your developer mates to see if it is exactly what they want.
Which means translating everything into Chinese. According to our cultural advisor, cum developer, cum councillor this can be very problematic, as you wouldn’t want to get your NO STANDING SIGNS mixed up with same sex marriage or having intimate relationship with your pets. This would be seen back in China as very bad Feng Shui and henceforth very very bad for the modernization of this region.
Red writing on white background is very bad Feng Shui as it looks like blood on snow. Gold writing on blue ground much more good luck, when parking in No Standing Zone. Developers excluded of course.
Four years would be about right, not counting the delays caused by the cultural misunderstandings through the use of Google Translation, I guessing more like six plus years, if ever.
August 6, 2016 at 10:36 AM
Reading the report (which is full of re-written history and irrelevancies), gives one a sense of awe at how utterly out of control and out of touch with the residents Glen Eira Council is.
The current Planning Scheme Review was ordered to be undertaken by the Planning when he rejected Council’s request for a further exemption from undertaking the legally required (Planning and Environment Act) community based review of the Planning Scheme every 4 years.
So what has Council done, they undertook the consultation and now they have applied an excessive timeline to the results.
This excessive timeline, combined with Council blatantly ignoring residents demands for the introduction of interim planning controls while detailed analysis is under taken, is nothing more than Council extending applying, by default, an extension to the exemption from community consultation
August 6, 2016 at 12:42 PM
Take all this up with the Minister