August 7, 2014
The City of Melbourne appears to be making some major strides in achieving greater transparency and accountability – at long last! Not only do they have a Notice of Motion, webcasts of council meetings, but this latest vote on reporting on open space contributions definitely caught our eye. Needless to say, Glen Eira Council has nothing remotely similar!
August 6, 2014
Council is required by law to report back to its residents on its performance throughout the year. This comes under the umbrella of Best Value, and the objective is to provide quantifiable measures which would indicate whether council is actually improving in its performance in all service areas. The legislation basically requires a council to ensure that:
(c) each service provided by a Council must be accessible to those members of the community for whom the service is intended;
(d) a Council must achieve continuous improvement in the provision of services for its community;
(e) a Council must develop a program of regular consultation with its community in relation to the services it provides;
(f) a Council must report regularly to its community on its achievements in relation to the principles set out in paragraphs (a), (b), (c), (d) and (e)
Given this, we have to ask:
We’ve uploaded the full document HERE, and ask residents not to laugh, especially at the following – the Town Planning ‘evaluation’. Please note:
We finally remind readers that year after year the 400 survey results that constitute the Community Satisfaction Report, have highlighted planning, traffic and consultation as the major failures of this council. Nothing in the Best Value report changes anything, nor even indicates ‘progress’ and ‘continuous service improvement’.
Again, we ask that readers refrain from laughter when perusing the following:
August 4, 2014
GLEN Eira Council has won the battle to reallocate State Government funding for CCTV cameras in Bentleigh to community safety programs throughout the suburb.
The $150,000 had originally been set aside to pay for the installation of cameras in Centre Rd, Bentleigh, but will instead be used for projects such as locking bike cages and community education programs.
Bentleigh’s Liberal MP Elizabeth Miller has chosen which community safety projects get funding.
Glen Eira Council was the only council in the state to turn down the money, as it didn’t want to pay for the continued upkeep and monitoring of the equipment.
Crime Prevention Minister Edward O’Donohue took a swipe at councillors when he made the announcement last week.
The statement released by Mr O’Donohue’s office labelled Glen Eira’s councillors as “ideologically preoccupied … with scandalous disregard for the safety of ratepayers”.
Mr O’Donohue said: “It would not have been fair for the Bentleigh community to have missed out on this money just because of the council’s disgraceful decision.”
In November the council voted to ask the State Government if part of the money could pay for the continued cost of the cameras, but that was rejected by the minister.
Glen Eira Mayor Neil Pilling said the comments were out of line.
“The Minister and local member’s comments are totally unnecessary and disrespectful to democratically elected local councillors who, by a strong majority, made an informed and considered position on CCTV cameras in Centre Rd, taking into account the needs, costs and benefits to the Bentleigh community,” Mr Pilling said.
“Minister O’Donohue seems to believe Bentleigh is a crime hotspot which is in full contradiction to what both Victoria Police and council understand to be the true situation.
“Rather than resorting to these types of negative political comments, in my view, Mr O’Donohue and Ms Miller should be more focused on working with all groups in the community to deliver much needed and improved facilities and services.”
Among the 18 local community safety proposals to receive funding there are projects to install locks, lights and alarms on community facilities, secure bike sheds for nine local schools, and education programs about crime and anti-social behaviour.
August 4, 2014
Melbourne’s apartment building boom is delivering poor outcomes for the city, with a third of new units badly designed and almost half too small, a forum on city planning will hear on Monday night.
The recently-founded Inner Melbourne Planning Alliance, founded earlier this year, will on Monday night stage City In Crisis?, a one-off event at Federation Square.
The forum is designed to stir debate around urban design ahead of November’s state election.
It will focus in particular on new apartment design in the CBD, and what organisers call a “radical program for the concentration of high density housing across inner Melbourne”.
Melbourne City Council’s co-ordinator of city plans and policy Leanne Hodyl is among the speakers at the event.
Ms Hodyl helped write the council’s recent draft housing strategy Homes for People, which showed some of Melbourne’s newest developments up to 10 times as dense as permitted in overseas cities.
She said on Sunday the existing policies to encourage affordable, well-designed and environmentally friendly apartment buildings were not working in Melbourne.
“We are getting zero affordability in terms of subsidised housing, one in three apartments are poor quality, and almost half of them are one-bedroom and under 50 square metres [in size],” she said. “Longer term that is not sustainable, socially or environmentally.”
Melbourne City Council is the fastest growing municipality in Australia, its residential population more than doubling since 2001 to now be around 116,000.
“It’s an economic success story,” Ms Hodyl said, “but it has to be a success story for the people who want to live here.”
She said Melbourne needed to aim “for something better than [to be] a city that is a place where people live for a couple of years and then leave because the housing doesn’t meet their needs anymore”.
Also at the event will be outgoing Victorian government architect Geoffrey London. On a panel alongside him will be well-known property analyst Monique Sasson.
Ms Sasson said few already living in Melbourne would be prepared to move into many of the new apartment towers now being built, “because they know they are a substandard”.
“The number of people you can fit into these apartment towers is mind boggling,” she said, and local residents would rightly ask “where is the supermarket, the parkland, the green-grocer, the doctor, the kindergarten?”
“There is no way in the world they [the properties] are going to hold value,” she said. “In five years’ time their underlying value is going to be less than what they paid for them.”
Ms Sasson said cranes on the city’s skyline were “a symbol of economic prosperity”, but there was a serious lack of infrastructure to deal with the number of apartments being built.
Representing the Property Council on Monday night’s panel will be Ashley Williams from Evolve Development, who said there needed to be a sensible discussion about what improving design standards would mean for apartment prices.
The state architect’s office has been working on a set of guidelines governing the size and design of apartments. A draft copy of the Better Apartment Design rules was leaked last month, and included minimum ceiling heights and minimum apartment sizes.
Mr Williams said there needed to be genuine consultation of the development industry as well as architects before any new rules were set. “[We] have to have a sensible discussion about the impacts on affordability,” he said.
July 30, 2014
PS – PLEASE NOTE MR BECK’S COMMENTS!
THE billion dollar Caulfield Village residential and retail project north of the Caulfield Racecourse is headed for VCAT.
Developer Beck Probuild has lodged an appeal against Glen Eira’s Council’s conditional approval for the first development plan.
BPG Caulfield Village director Sam Beck said: “All we are doing is appealing the clarity and consistency of some of the minor conditions of the approved Development Plan which includes engineering, design and parking.’’
“We don’t see them as significant items and we believe that we can resolve them with the Glen Eira City Council.’’
Councillors want the developer to provide 130 publicly available off-street car spaces across the site to compensate for existing on-street parks that will be lost to the project.
They also want 127 car spaces in the Smith St Precinct for use by Caulfield Tabaret/Glasshouse patrons at all times during operating hours.
Those spaces are required as part of the MRC’s permit for the tabaret and will be lost to the Caulfield Village development.
Councillors approved the first development plan by six votes to three.
The hearing is listed for September 29 and 30.
July 25, 2014
July 23, 2014
The Open Space Contribution Levy has featured prominently at the last two council meetings. At the July 1st meeting the claim was that with objectors going to a Panel this is estimated to add approximately 7 months and that revenue ‘foregone’ during this time could be of the order of $2m. At last night’s council meeting the $2 million suddenly morphed into this (from the officer’s report) – At the 2013-14 rates, that would be a difference of about seven months or around $700k. Lipshutz even made up his own figures and spoke of a million dollars! The best lines however came from Hyams with his assertion that the objectors had a ‘tribal distrust of council’ and this was their ‘motivation’ for lodging objections.
Perhaps a far more reasonable take on council’s approach to collecting money from developers would be to calculate how much money has been LOST over a period of 11 years. Perhaps residents should also be seeking answers as how much land council has sold, as opposed to how much land has been purchased in order to meet the open space demands – first identified in 1987.
Even on the new ‘transparency’ so lauded by Delahunty, the figures provided in the officer’s report are fascinating – and of course entirely begs the question as to why such data is only made available now and not on a regular basis! More telling is the fact that council states that the range of rates currently applied are – 2.25% to 5.0% (maximum). So how come, when the supplied list is analysed NOT ONE SINGLE DEVELOPMENT IN THIS LIST OF 54 HAS PAID 5%? Further questions should also be asked. For example:
For eleven years now (since 29/5/2003) council has done nothing to up its open space levy – even though it has been fully cognisant of the fact that open space is a premium in Glen Eira. How many millions have been lost during this time? And how much money has been lost by not even applying the full 5% that council could legally apply?
Compared to the 11 years of doing absolutely nothing, a delay of even 7 months, seems very worthwhile in order to ensure that an amendment is passed which will truly benefit the community!
July 22, 2014
Tonight’s vote on the CCTV policy should be very entertaining if nothing else. The policy itself (in stark contrast to other councils) contains the following paragraph –
Council will not operate CCTV where the primary purpose is enforcement of the criminal law. Enforcement of the criminal law is the responsibility of law enforcement agencies. If such agencies wish to install and operate CCTV systems on Council property, Council will not unreasonably withhold consent
And just for the record, we invite readers to compare what Jim Magee is cited as stating above, and what he said in December, 2013. This is taken from our post of the time –
MAGEE: said that cctv is ‘now a necessity’ and claimed that in 2010 he had called for a report on this. Even though Glen Eira isn’t a ‘hot bed of crime’ it’s important because ‘a lot of people take comfort’ and the cameras give a sense of security to people. Repeated that cameras can detect crime and prosecuting people. Thought that the Bentleigh rotunda would be ‘one of the first places’ where they could put the cameras. Thought it was also ‘incumbent’ for council to ‘do things’ for all those people likely to commit a crime in order to ‘discourage the anti-social behaviour’. Said that ‘this would probably be a large part of council’s operations’ in the future. This would be the role of policy in identifying ‘how to manage that in the future’. ‘This is the beginning, this is the first step’. He commends the motion.
Consistency is, of course, none of these councillors’ strong point!
July 22, 2014
How many more ‘clerical errors’ will be allowed to go through to the keeper before heads start to roll? How many more times will dubious statistics, fudged figures, and sheer nonsense be permitted to be put out into the public domain by this administration, and no-one is held accountable? How much longer will residents have to wait before councillors do what they are elected to do and start asking some telling questions and demand correct, and 100% honest answers?
Presented below are two tables published by council. The first derives from a media release dated 18th June 2014. The second comes from Item 9.5 in the current agenda.
What is truly staggering about these tables is:
Here are a few sentences cited from the June Media Release –
Development in local residential streets, now zoned Neighbourhood Residential, continues to be at the same low level it has been over the whole of the thirteen years covered by the graph (eg. dual occupancy).
The pattern reflects the Pareto Principle (“80–20 Rule”): 80 per cent of development takes place on 20 per cent of land.
In the first place, many of council’s own Quarterly Reports indicate that this is not the case – ie figures of only 56% in one instance and well below the 80/20 in other examples. More significantly, the term ‘development’ is cleverly employed as a substitute for ‘dwellings’. A ‘development’ and a ‘dwelling’ are not identical. Actual ‘development’ in local, residential streets is occurring at alarming levels.
July 19, 2014
Item 9.8 – Minimum floor space requirements
This item is in response to a Request for a Report from the previous council meeting. On par with so many other potential initiatives, Glen Eira’s response is to sit on its hands and do bugger all. Everything is always someone else’s problem to solve! Below is what was asked and the underlined sections are what we believe has not been satisfactorily responded to in the officer’s report.
Minimum floor space requirements for dwellings in other jurisdictions including internationally and what benefit or detriment is created by these requirements;
How minimum floor space requirements could be beneficial for Glen Eira in the case that such requirements are adopted by the Victorian state; and
How Glen Eira Council could advocate for state-wide minimum floor space requirements such as through a planning amendment.
The report by the City of Melbourne on its Unit developments and liveability as it may apply to the City of Glen Eira.
The report starts off with a full page of philosophical waffle that works to deflect attention from the questions asked and instead resorts to the usual ruse of how good the current planning system is in that setbacks and height limits do the job of helping to determine the size of apartments and even internal amenity. Setbacks and height limits (if they are applied that is) only determine overall site coverage. They don’t determine how many units the developer can cram into the resulting available space.
More waffle and unsubstantiated opinion then follows – It is likely that if a minimum dwelling size is dictated, it would tend to become the default size and counter productive to dwelling diversity.
Really! Then the City of Melbourne’s research must all be nonsense for them to claim the exact opposite — The predominance of high-cost, one and two bedroom, small and inadaptable apartments is driving the establishment of a homogenous population in regards to household income, age and employment of our residents (City of Melbourne, 2013b). (page 41).
The truth of the matter is that Glen Eira already has a defacto ‘default’ size of one and two bedroom dwellings that contribute nothing to housing diversity. If council was truly concerned about ‘liveability’ and ‘diversity’ then it would publish figures on: how many 1 bedroom apartments have been built in the past 3 years? How many two bedroom apartments have been built in the past 3 years? What is the average size of these apartments? On this point, we note that the Caulfield Village development of 442 units (8 of which are town houses) contains over 200 units of less than 60 square metres in size with quite a few well under 50 square metres! Yet, there was not one single word in any of council’s documentation about this issue and not one word issued from any councillor. Total silence about access to sunlight, access to public open space, and ‘internal amenity’. Size was a taboo subject altogether. When asked at the planning conference, residents were told that these aspects would be ‘investigated’ and put into officer recommendations. We challenge anyone to find a single sentence in the resulting report that focuses on these questions, and therefore ‘social amenity’ and ‘liveability’!
We then find another gem in the officer’s report – It is considered that it is difficult to argue that town planning is best placed and therefore should intervene in dwelling size to a greater extent than it currently does. Why is it ‘difficult’ to argue when countless cities worldwide are doing exactly this? Moreland City Council in fact has introduced a draft Amendment (uploaded here) which attempts to set specific standards for size, environmental design, open space, etc. Strange isn’t it that the officer’s report just happens to overlook this important fact? The reason of course is that council intends to do absolutely nothing that might impinge on development and rate revenue. So without any shame we’re back to the old chestnut of ‘leave it to government’!
And let’s also forget all those essentials of ‘liveability’ that the Melbourne City Council defines quite clearly – The size of an apartment is often fundamental to achieving good levels of amenity. New homes must have enough space for basic daily activities, be able to accommodate standard sized furniture, have storage space for everyday items and be adaptable and flexible in their layout to allow for different lifestyles and users. (page 36)
The most hypocritical statement in this entire report comes with reference to ResCode and the assertion that the ‘standards’ set by this protocol ‘must be met’. We ask residents to consider how many planning applications come before council and do NOT ADHERE to the standards are granted permits. Time and again officer reports are stacked with such comments as no ‘unreasonable impact’ and so on. Council can’t have it both ways. Either the standards should be applied wholeheartedly, or they are not worth the paper they are written on.
We would also like to point out a recent disturbing trend in officer reports on planning applications. Not too long ago the reports would very clearly ennumerate the NUMBERS of 1 bedroom, 2 bedroom and 3 bedroom units proposed. That is now gone and readers are left to decipher from the car parking standards what is what – an impossible task since both one and two bedrooms are required to have the same number of car spaces allotted. Please make up your own minds if such omissions are deliberate or simply an ‘oversight’!
Finally, we have uploaded the two relevant City of Melbourne’s documents (here & here) and urge readers to compare what is stated in these documents as opposed to council’s once again ‘do nothing’ report. And just for the record, readers may also find the following extracts from the Melbourne efforts very enlightening –
The trend in the City of Melbourne, however, is for increasingly small apartments with 40 per cent having less than 50 m2 of floor space, the minimum size for one bedroom apartments in Sydney, Adelaide and London. Consumer research in London (Bartlett K et al, 2002) shows that space is high on the list of priorities of the increasing number of one-person households and that criticism about lack of space is expressed by all groups of home buyers with singles just as vociferous as families. (page 36)
Evidence on attracting and retaining families in inner urban, mixed income communities (Silverman E. et al, 2005) reviewed several London case studies and found that these communities work best when the homes are designed with families in mind, with adequate storage, ample kitchens, family bathrooms and access to outdoor space where possible. (page 36)
Fundamental to a resident’s quality of life is the size and layout of an apartment. No amount of sensitive or innovative design can compensate for apartments that are too small to meet the basic living requirements of the household. (page 48)
And from the discussion paper –
The evidence suggests that letting the market create diversity is unrealistic and that it is impossible to predict or fully anticipate market tendencies, particularly as the housing market is now operating within a global context. (p.51)
In Victoria, apartments are primarily designed to meet the national Building Code of Australia (BCA) standards which is driving a minimum compliance approach. It is understood that the BCA standards were not prepared with consideration for the type of higher density development currently being constructed and are therefore met too easily. The case study analysis concluded that a lack of clear planning policy outcomes together with current BCA requirements is resulting in poor apartment quality in Melbourne. (p.70)
Glen Eira Debates 