Once again a whopping agenda that lumps together some of the most important planning issues that confront the community. These are:

  • Bentleigh Structure Plan community feedback
  • Bentleigh East  Neighbourhood Centre amendment
  • Elsternwick Structure Plan amendment
  • Carnegie Structure Plan amendment

Very little has changed in regard to the Major Activity Centres, especially in relation to heights, and overshadowing. All this despite the fact that the majority of responses were opposed to various recommendations in the structure plans and the mooted DDO’s. Carnegie did not even have community consultation following the abandonment of version one (ie Amendment C184)!!!!!!!

We will deal with each of the above as separate posts beginning with the Bentleigh consultation summary.

Bentleigh Community Feedback ‘summary’

  • There were 106 survey responses, 17 emails and a petition of 221 signatories. Council states that it sent out 4,101 letters to surrounding households. The feedback equates to a pathetic 2.56% response rate for the survey. Why? Are Bentleigh residents so apathetic that they don’t care? Have residents given up on believing that their voices can affect outcomes in Glen Eira? Or is there something drastically wrong with the way in which council communicates its intentions? We have yet to see any analyses EVER of why feedback is so low and what can be done to improve this. It serves council well to simply go through the motions of ‘consultation’ despite the fact that survey after survey has been anything but a genuine attempt to elicit relevant and valid responses.
  • Again, we are not privy to the raw data. No publication of the responses as has happened in the past. Instead we have a ‘doctored’ summary that falls far short of reporting on what was actually said/written.
  • Language used remains a problem. The officer’s report is vague and imprecise with terminology such as ‘mixed responses’, ‘about half’, ‘support for accommodating growth’, ‘some support’, etc. Very little is quantified.
  • The summary report itself is nothing more than a public relations exercise. For example: On ‘retaining character’ we find this conclusion in the report – 55 percent of participants indicated that accommodating growth above the commercial strip was better than doing it in other parts of Bentleigh. Ostensibly this sounds like a majority are in favour, but one must query the value of the question itself. There could very well be support for greater density in the commercial core, but THIS DOES NOT MEAN that respondents are in favour of 8 storeys (discretionary) adjacent to heritage homes. The value of any response and what conclusions might be drawn are 100% dependent on the quality of the questions asked. The online survey as we’ve commented on before was carefully engineered to avoid as much as possible any responses that could be interpreted as ‘negative’ or opposed to the recommendations of the structure plan.  
  • The above criticisms can also be directed to this conclusion – 51% of participants indicated they ‘strongly agreed’ or ‘agreed’ that measures such as height limits and upper-level setbacks for new development would help to retain the character of Centre Road. Of course people want height limits. But we were never asked what those height limits should be!!!!!!!
  • On page 4 of the summary report we are told that 20 percent of participants indicated they would like a building height limit reduction in the centre when asked about retaining character in a growing centre. This sounds like a clear minority in favour of reduced height limits. But this  alleged 20% is only from those individuals who took the option to write something in the text boxes. And again, no question asked what is an appropriate height limit?
  • More concerning is that the above cited 20% does not correlate with what is then presented in the following table:

 We’ve highlighted all those responses which could be seen as pertaining to the issue of height. The totals are far in excess of the previously stated 20%!!!!!! However, without full publication of all the responses then it is not possible to determine whether the 20% is anywhere near accurate or council’s fudging of the responses. Transparency is again the victim in this reporting.

CONCLUSION(S)

Until this council is prepared to undertake genuine consultation that includes full oversight by councillors and the community engagement committee in the drafting of survey questions then residents cannot hope to be participants in anything but a carefully orchestrated farce that fulfils legal requirements and nothing else. Nor can residents have any confidence in the resulting feedback summaries when the raw data is with-held. When council fights so hard to avoid full disclosure one must surely doubt the results.

As stated earlier, there must be a full analyses of why consultation in Glen Eira is such a failure in terms of community feedback. This should start at the first stage of notification to residents – are they provided with enough detail to engage their interest/concern? Are they expected to undertake hours of reading that involves hundreds of pages instead of succinct summaries? And how many residents have simply given up because they don’t believe that anything they put forward will eventuate? This isn’t apathy we believe. It is simply distrust of council and the predetermined nature of all decision making. If residents truly believed that council was ready to listen and act, then we are confident that feedback would quadruple and that residents could actually believe that council was acting on their behalf. Sadly this is not the modus operandi of Glen Eira City Council!