KANGAROO BAY

I AM a recent arrival in Bellerive, having bought a house in November. I love it here. The Kangaroo Bay foreshore is a fantastic community asset, and the new parklands along its edge are wonderful. Our first walk along the shore to Bellerive village was memorable. Subsequently, to my dismay, I have realised the extent of the Clarence Council’s disrespectful treatment of its own community, by approving a totally inappropriate and oversized set of buildings for the site, without anything like proper public consultation and subverting its own planning scheme. I have read the council’s 20-page public consultation policy on their website. Was it followed? No. How can a council, and the State Government, allow such a thing? How can our public foreshore be sold (or given – we are not to know, apparently) to a foreign developer to construct such an inappropriate development for this beautiful area? It seems that the planned hospitality college is only loosely associated with our local TAFE system and that it, and the enormous hotel/apartment complex may be largely for the use of foreign fee-paying students rather than locals. I hope I am wrong. It should be located elsewhere. Like 170-200 others, I was at the public meeting at Bellerive on June 4. I soon became concerned and angry too. The mayor was there and heard very clearly why his public were angry and I fail to see why he was “confused”“by the adverse public reaction to this development, as he stated in the Mercury recently. There are more proposals to come for more crown land along Kangaroo Bay. Is the same foreign developer involved? Very possibly yes. I am sincerely hoping that sanity, not greed, and the wishes of the local community, are taken into account for any further developments, and that the lovely village feeling of Kangaroo Bay is retained. Once gone of course, we can’t get it back.