The following audio is taken from last night’s council meeting where once again the council was split in voting 5 to 4 to send the draft structure plan out for consultation. There were many criticisms of the current draft, plus some fear mongering from certain councillors and the administration. The final vote was – AGAINST: Esakoff, Szmood, Zyngier, Pennicuik. Those who voted FOR were: Cade, Zhang, Athanasopolous, Magee and Parasol. We note that not for the first time, Parasol did not utter a word as to the reasoning behind his vote. He simply put up his hand.
Here is what one resident had to say about the draft and its unbelievable shortcomings:
We will comment more fully on what transpired in discussion on this item in the days ahead.
PS: In the above audio, Torres tried to negate the potential for a ten storey development by referring to the ‘setbacks’. What he doesn’t state is that rear setbacks for commercial dwellings backing on to heritage areas are NOT MANDATORY. They are DISCRETIONARY – and we all know how little control DISCRETIONARY provides!
Glen Eira Debates 
July 5, 2023 at 10:34 AM
Parasol promised so much and has delivered nothing, other than supporting the bureaucrats swindles. He’s a waste of space.
July 5, 2023 at 1:36 PM
That Andrews bloke has been all over the radio today. On the behalf of his developer mates. Saying his top priority is more apartments are needed in the middle and inner suburbs to keep rents down.
Albert Einstein said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” This would explain our current State Government to the tee.
July 5, 2023 at 2:07 PM
As the resident pointed out, Council hasn’t done the strategic work to support the “structure plan”. The sad history of GECC is to waive compliance with amenity standards and to argue for reducing standards. We also know that it has in the past secretly lobbied Government to change zonings, decision guidelines, amenity standards, planning outcomes without any community consultation.
GECC is so developer-friendly that it waves through developments so egregiously bad that VCAT rejects them on review. As we have seen, Council doesn’t believe in or support the Apartment Development standards, and believes it is acceptable to largely overshadow neighbouring properties’ communal open space and habitable room windows. It has even resorted to blatant untruths, referring to properties in residential zones as “commercial areas”. There is no way I would trust them with planning decisions involving anything discretionary.
I’m apprehensive about listening to the meeting recording just why the five councillors voted for the plan. Obvious thing was to defer until the worst aspects of the plan had been cleaned up–or were those councillors happy with the plan and don’t think it can be improved? Did any councillor move to defer the decision in the course of the meeting?
July 5, 2023 at 2:16 PM
Cr Zyngier attempted to move an amendment to defer, but Magee claimed this was outside council’s ‘no surprises policy’ and therefore did not allow it.
July 5, 2023 at 3:33 PM
GECC doesn’t have a “no surprises” policy, but it does have a Council Meeting Procedure Local Law which allows amendments to motions. Anyway I’m wondering why the 5 councillors endorsed this statement from the Draft Structure Plan: “This temporary DDO, applies only to commercial zones of the centre and is due to expire in June 2023”. The actual expiry date is 31 December 2024. How many other factual errors does the Plan contain?