Glen Eira Debates

The infamous C110 is now available. We will be commenting on this amendment over the next few postings. This post concentrates on the Housing & Residential parameters as stated. All extracts are verbatim quotes from the document and uploaded here.

This amendment has been prepared by the Minister for Planning who is the planning authority for this amendment.The amendment has been made at the request of the Glen Eira City Council.

COMMENT: So much for the myth that Council did not know well and truly beforehand that community consultation would not be occurring. Nor does it excuse the fact that the date submitted to the department was well before the public questions on consultation were tabled at council meetings. The responses were thus untruthful and deceitful.

The amendment applies the NRZ to the Minimal Change areas, the RGZ to the Housing Diversity areas and the GRZ to the small areas around the periphery of the Housing Diversity areas and along transport routes.

COMMENT: Nothing could be clearer than that HOUSING DIVERSITY HAS EXPANDED! Yet Council, apart from admitting changes to the Alma Club site and one other, still maintain that nothing much has changed and that the amendment is simply a ‘translation’ of current zones.

Another objective of Council is to promote the integrated planning of the city. Integrated planning involves working with the community, residents, traders, service providers and other stakeholders to enhance the quality of Glen Eira’s suburbs and their environmental, economic and social sustainability. Integrated planning involves looking beyond traditional town planning solutions. It is important to encourage people to participate in the development of their city and to develop overall visions and plans for areas. It involves holistically looking at a wide range of issues in the local community including; infrastructure, social planning, economic development, recreation and capital works.

COMMENT: So much for the spin versus the reality! So much for ‘integrated planning’ that involves the community. To include such blatant propaganda in an official document that has no relationship to actual events is both insulting to residents and says much about the workings of council.

• Facilitate high quality urban design and architecture that will enhance neighbourhood character.

• Encourage the retention of existing vegetation, in particular vegetation and trees which contribute to the City’s tree canopy.

• Encourage energy efficient housing design, landscape design, construction materials and techniques that will minimise environmental impacts in residential developments.

• Encourage residents and developers to adopt more environmentally friendly practices such as reducing water usage, recycling and reducing energy use.

• Encourage rainwater retention and usage in larger developments.

• Ensure that the community is involved in decision making about their neighbourhood.
  

• Ensure that the traffic impacts are adequately addressed when considering new residential development.

• Ensure that where new development places an increased burden on infrastructure it contributes to the upgrading of infrastructure. 

COMMENT: All motherhood statements that have lacked and continue to lack strategies and policies to enforce these objectives. We have commented numerous times on council’s refusal to introduce Environmental Sustainable Design, water saving design, traffic management precinct plans into its planning scheme. These sentences merely continue the moratorium on action. They are intended to sound good, but are meaningless. How wonderful too that ‘infrastructure’ gets a mention when council REMOVED ITS DEVELOPMENT CONTRIBUTIONS LEVY. Ironically, they may now be forced to re-introduce it!

• Using the Commercial Centres Policy to strengthen the core of strip shopping centres, identify declining centres and identify new opportunities for non-retail functions. 

• Using the Monash Medical Centre Precinct Structure Using the Non Residential Uses in Residential Zones Policy to provide some certainty when planning to establish non residential uses in residential zones (eg medical centres, childcare centres).

• Using the Heritage Policy to manage new development (including additions, alterations and demolition of all or parts of a heritage place) in all areas covered by the Heritage Overlay.

COMMENT: These sentences are possibly the most damning in the entire document since they exhibit for all to see the sheer incompetence of council’s and the minister’s planning department(s). It simply reveals that Glen Eira council either does not check its work carefully enough, or that it does not even know what is in its own planning scheme. PLEASE NOTE: Council does not have a ‘commercial centres policy’ – that was removed over a year ago as was the Monash Medical centre (and it was never a structure plan!). Childcare centres are lumped together with medical centres. It seems that Glen Eira planners don’t know that they introduced a separate ‘childcare’ policy and removed it from the ‘non residential uses’ quite recently. Sloppy, inept, and totally unprofessional!

FUTURE STRATEGIC WORK

• For housing diversity areas, in conjunction with Melbourne Water, further investigating the capacity of drainage infrastructure to accommodate multi-unit development.
  

• Developing local structure plans / urban design frameworks to guide development in the neighbourhood centres.
  

• Investigating a vegetation management program which considers appropriate controlsand guidelines to ensure vegetation protection.
  

• Developing environmental sustainability guidelines for residential development bydrawing together the best practice in this area to ensure that new residential development is more environmentally sustainable
  

• Developing “suburb” plans for each suburb which integrate land use and developmentplanning, with planning for infrastructure, capital works, recreation, parks and gardens,street trees and business development.
  

• Developing local area traffic management plans and parking precinct plans to control the effects of parking and traffic intrusion in residential areas.

• Implementing local area traffic management changes in existing areas in consultation with communities to improve safety and amenity and discourage use by inappropriate traffic.
  

• Investigating mechanisms which require developers to undertake street tree planting.
  

COMMENT: Promises, promises which we believe will never be introduced or undertaken given the record of this council over the past decade and its abject failure to make a move on most of these aspirations. The 2010 Planning Scheme Review, plus the 2011 Planisphere report recommended reviewing Heritage Areas. This hasn’t been touched since 1996! Readers also need to note that the accompanying ‘policies’ in this document go as far back as 1999. The promises of years and years ago remain the unfulfilled promises of today. This does not fill us with confidence that any of these ‘future’ plans will be acted upon – but they sure as hell sound good for any resident who might decide to actually read the amendment and/or the planning scheme.

We take this opportunity to respond to the comments made by Cr Pilling featured above. It’s worth noting that this posting has now been removed!

GE Debates is labelled as ‘unfair’, ‘irrelevant’, consisting of ‘cowards’ and ‘untruths’ amongst other things.  It is also claimed that we do not ‘verify’ our data. All of these labels are symptomatic of a council and its councillors who believe that by attacking the messenger they can absolve themselves from having to deal with the countless issues we have raised over the past 3 years. On every vital aspect of governance this council has underperformed. Here is a list in case Cr Pilling has forgotten –

• Meeting procedures that stand in stark contrast to every other council in the state
• Consultation or lack thereof especially in relation to the residential zones, budgets and council plans
• Lack of transparency re countless decision making processes – especially planning and role of the DPC
• Acceptance of sub-standard reporting by officers
• Lack of commitment and action on numerous issues – carbon reduction targets; tree register, vegie gardens, cctv cameras; car sharing; ESD policies; WSUD policies; Urban Design Frameworks – and the list goes on and on.
• Repeated failures to provide comprehensive cost-benefit analysis within officer reports

For each of these issues we have taken the time and effort to contrast this council’s performance with that of its neighbours. We have supplied facts, figures, statistics, and we believe sound argument. Glen Eira Council, in contrast, has repeatedly come up short when it comes to these basic elements. Residents need to ask themselves just one thing – Why? Why is it that other councils can achieve all these things and Glen Eira is incapable, or even worse, unwilling? And, if we are so ‘irrelevant’ then why bother putting up such a post and why the repeated attempts in council meetings to answer our criticisms.

Pilling’s post is typical then of the modus operandi of this council. Ignore the issue and slay the messenger. If the issue just can’t be ignored then there is always spin or secrecy. The most self incriminating comment that Pilling can make and which exemplifies his own inadequacies is the sentence – In my view the authors of this blog are trapped in the bitterness and outdated practices of local government as conducted in the last century….. . It is certainly illuminating and sad, that a current councillor believes that the call for transparency, accountability, and sound financial management belongs in the last century! Our view is that times may have changed, but that Glen Eira Council remains marooned in a past where oligarchies ruled and their actions went unquestioned. In 2013 thanks to the internet and social media all is open to scrutiny. That is the foundation of good government – so sorely missing in Glen Eira thanks to the inability of its councillors to recognise and accept this simple fact.   As decision makers councillors should be called to account when their decisions so often fly in the face of community aspirations and their arguments lack all credibility and substance.

Finally it is worth pointing out that over 461,000 hits must be a sure sign of ‘irrelevance’!!!!!!

The State Government and Council’s strategy is transparently obvious [reduce amenity for all but start with the significant minority in “targetted” areas] and it continues an inglorious tradition started by Labor when Melbourne 2030 was released. Remember this statement: “The character of established residential areas will be protected through Rescode, and increased densities will not be achieved at the expense of existing amenity.”? Not that Council or VCAT ever took it seriously.

Yesterday’s announcement reaffirms the Government’s belief that it should be able to reduce people’s amenity without consulting them; taxation without representation. It doesn’t matter whether Lib or Lab or Brown, that is the principle.

Look at the huge chunk of Residential 1 Zone properties that are now about to find themselves in Residential Growth Zones or  General Residential Zones. Where once they had ResCode, which included a 9m height limit, now they don’t. Council argues quite shamelessly that people will be better off because now there is “certainty”, since previously Council and VCAT ignored ResCode if it suited them. The same people who repeatedly abused the planning scheme are still in charge. What guarantee do residents have that whatever the schedules might say (and of course these remain top secret) that this planning department won’t continue with its old ways of handing out dispensations on countless of these ‘standards’?

Remember too that height limits only apply to dwellings or residential buildings. It won’t be long before we see some imaginative applications that push the envelope, quite literally. And of course, there simply aren’t any height limits for the old major activity centres and the main roads they sit on. Glen Huntly Road already has 10 storeys. That is the future – minimal ‘commercial’ or ‘retail’ and stacks of apartments.

Then there’s some seemingly random choices made, all without any transparency. Glen Huntly, which is a major activity centre, is now to be surrounded by GRZ. It has a railway, a tramway, 2 State Arterial Roads, and open space. Then look at what Council is doing to a bunch of Edwardian homes and California bungalows in Carnegie, which instead is to be rezoned RGZ.

The media releases remain silent on the contents of the Schedules to the Zones, yet the map does give a strong hint that at least some content has been inserted to replace “none specified” for various amenity standards. Who decided what should be inserted? Council staff. Council couldn’t even be bothered to vote on it.

The recent decision to refuse a Permit for Wilks St (Alma Club) is suddenly looking shaky, until such time as people can evaluate the implications of being rezoned to GRZ and Schedule 1 (no increase in rear setbacks). It’s no surprise that this has suddenly dropped its Minimal Change status and is now designated as General Residential Zone. In other words, 3 storeys is fine and 75 units in a dead end street is perfectly okay.

If Elizabeth Miller believes “the Victorian Coalition Government is delivering on their promise of protecting residents’ backyards” then she should be prepared to state how many backyards have just been condemned to being buried underneath concrete. I wonder if she even knows. Yesterday’s obligatory soundbite was carefully filmed in a tree-lined street. There won’t be many trees left when there’s no permeable soil available for roots in the targeted areas.

Will the State Government accept responsibility for flood damage when the drains are inadequate for the rapid runoff of water from these concrete ghettos? Does it have a crime strategy for the consequences of creating an unhealthy imbalance in demographics? Has it identified where the new sports facilities will be located?

Expect traffic to be managed when areas that you have to pass through have their population swollen by several thousand residents? There are no amenity standards for traffic congestion, no money to eliminate railway level crossings in the municipality, and it’s not even safe to ride a bike since Council/VCAT encourages street parking for multi-unit development [count the number of applications which seek and obtain a waiver]. Besides, the speed limits are generally too high for the population density. Will people be walking to their nearest open space? Depends how far it is. Yesterday’s announcement ignored that element of community well-being.

Clearly the policies behind yesterday’s announcement are unstable. If you increase the population faster than the jobs in an area, then more people will have to be travelling further distances at a slower average speed by less convenient means. Council admits its planning for an extra 18000+ people over 20 years, so it should be able to show its traffic modelling along with documented assumptions like where they have to go for work, recreation, services. Of course such detailed planning is not Glen Eira’s forte. The irony is that when council officers front up at VCAT and argue that the municipality has already exceeded its population forecasts, then that only throws more doubt on the figures produced by council this time around.

Planning for a community is so much more than trumpeting a bunch of discriminatory height restrictions. This entirely begs the question of where council has been for the past 10 years? No height limits throughout this time; no structure plans; no parking precinct plans (then or now); no Environmental Sustainable Design (then or now); no Urban Design Framework (then or now). It’s been hell bent on more and more development. This latest announcement only provides further evidence that the philosophy, strategy, and ambition remains intact. Glen Eira will remain the developer’s paradise.

Finally, we remind readers that in March 2012 the officers in their wisdom wanted to introduce a greater percentage of permeable surfaces but ONLY FOR MINIMAL CHANGE. Councillors passed a resolution that in part read: “Prepare a Planning Scheme Amendment to lower the percentage of impervious surfaces within the Minimal Change Area and Housing Diversity Areas.”. No such amendment has seen the light, so we can only conclude that once again a council resolution has been ignored or conveniently forgotten and not acted upon in a ‘timely manner’ as required by law. Now we discover that the ORIGINAL recommendation of 25% permeable surfaces will only apply in what was formerly known as Minimal Change. This is how this council works and residents need to be not merely aware but alarmed at how their rights have been continually trampled upon.

Last but not least, here is a glimpse into the future for all those areas with the nice little light blue lines marked on them!