Eyes on prize
THE announcement of the successful tenderer of CoGG’s new head office is welcome news for Geelong. If the financial plan underpinning the proposal announced by council comes to fruition, even better.
The major underlying driver for this project has been inefficiencies and other operational downsides of having CoGG spread staff over multiple locations. Some of these inefficiencies are financial but even more are intangible and equally significant.
The challenge is to unlock, and then leverage from, the many benefits achievable from bringing the large council workforce into one workplace. Among these are better co-ordination, improved working relationships and collaboration between departments.
The large public plaza that forms part of the planned complex is also a welcome inclusion. Geelong has long lacked one large central city “square”, where civic events happen and where people can gather easily and happily. Our waterfront — and to some extent Johnstone Park — have come to fill that role in recent decades but back one or two blocks into the CBD, no such place exists.
While the Mercer St location of this new plaza is not central CBD as we understand it now, given good design and effective activation, Geelong will finally have a civic plaza of which we can be proud.
This announcement came within days of the release of the Implementation Plan for the Geelong City Deal.
The City Deal memorandum of understanding, signed but the Federal and State governments in January 2018, states the primary purpose of a City Deal is to: “.. . improve the lives of people through better transport, improved housing supply and affordability, better access to jobs and improved environmental outcomes”.
The MoU has six “Domains of Action” that speak of “evidencebased” infrastructure investment, jobs and skills development, innovation, liveability and improved civic governance and environmental planning decisions to facilitate economic growth.
Importantly, improved housing supply and affordability is one of the six domains although this area is not addressed in any way in the City Deal, a significant omission and missed opportunity. Nationally, there are nine City Deals finalised or under preparation and most address housing issues.
Although $108 million of Geelong’s $370 million City Deal will — somewhat ironically, like something from Utopia — be spent 150km away on the Shipwreck Coast, the projects inherent in the deal contain many important elements for Geelong, prime among these is the long-awaited Convention and Exhibition Precinct.
However, many concerns surround the plan to extend the Green Spine from Gheringhap St to Bellerine St, which is foreshadowed as part of the deal’s CBD revitalisation package. We should hasten slowly on this project.
The Green Spine at a purely conceptual level is attractive and conceived with the best of civic intentions. But the reality of what has been delivered and — importantly — how it was delivered raises alarm bells for this project.
The jury is still out on the Green Spine as it exists. While there are widely divergent views among the community about the spine, there is no doubt that the enormous and lengthy disruption along Malop St during construction was counterproductive at least — and devastating at worst — for many CBD businesses.
These works diverted people away from the CBD to outlying centres and this trend continues. “Build it and they will come” has not quite happened since.
The reality for businesses is that — despite significantly reduced customer traffic and turnover during, and indeed after, such public works — the rent, staff wages and other fixed business costs must still be paid. There is no government compensation nor insurance for such situations.
My great fear is that starting the next Green Spine stages, and particularly that between Gheringhap and Moorabool streets — with all the associated traffic restrictions and road closures — will recreate that most regrettable situation, again reduce business activity and work against achieving the CBD revitalisation the project purports to deliver.
Geelong has positive, gamechanging projects ahead inherent in the City Deal but we need to ensure that each project is indeed evidence-based and actually achieves the desired long-term objective.