Plan to relocate uni a slap in face for Ratepayers, residents and students

The Hobart City Council has let down its ratepayers, not to mention uni students, by pushing ahead with a plan to relocate UTAS to central Hobart, writes

I BEGAN my research for this by carefully reading the published City Deal plan for Hobart documents from 2016.

I became increasingly alarmed at the lack of detail provided regarding the Hobart City Council and UTAS joint commitment to the relocation of the university campus to the city.

I read much about Macquarie Point, the airport, Antarctic links, transport, affordable housing and traffic.

I read implementation plan updates, annual progress reports, but just a few lines regarding this seismic shift planned for the Sandy Bay university campus abandonment and move to the city.

I read not one, not one word about 2700 dwellings to be built on an abandoned campus.

The proposed relocation became the minnow in the pool of blurb and bubble on other projects. The last one, dated April 2022, was the longest reference appearing since 2016.

The reference read: “The

University of Tasmania, Tasmanian government and Hobart City Council have continued to work together to align planning and investment, discuss transit needs and enable urban design, to support the transition of the university’s southern campus into the CBD.”

It certainly appears council is being led by the nose by an unaccountable-to-the-public, law-unto-itself entity, using taxpayers’ money and student fees.

Councillors are required to sign non-disclosure documents for some meetings with the University Council. Why? It creates a veil of secrecy.

How could council approve and encourage, with no published feasibility study, no published costing and no consultation with your ratepayers, a fundamental recasting of the CBD of Hobart to change it from a commercial hub into a so-called “university town”?

Such a decision is likely to have profound commercial consequences on the longterm, hardworking small and medium business proprietors who depend on passing commercial trade, not just university students. Not only will this redevelopment potentially dramatically reduce commercial scale, but it will have dire consequences so far as parking and the already completely non-functional traffic grid in the city centre.

Council has let down its commercial base without any transparent process at all.

How could council approve in principle and encourage, with no published feasibility

study, no published costing and no consultation, the most fundamental restructuring of Sandy Bay, Dynnyrne and Mt Nelson? It appears council is joining in and encouraging the removal of one of the most beautiful university campuses in the world and a treasure that belongs to Tasmania.

And it would appear to me to approve, in principle, a development of 2700 dwellings on 42ha, representing the creation of a new suburb the size of Blackmans Bay.

This scheme suggests it has been broadly approved and encouraged by the council without any proper consideration of the extraordinary traffic congestion, parking and an absence of infrastructure.

The outcome is Hobart losing one of its most valuable assets. In my opinion council has betrayed its ratepayers in foisting upon them this dreadful scheme. This seems to me to represent an extraordinary shortfall in the representation of Hobart ratepayers, the city traders, students, university academics and researchers and the residents of Sandy Bay, Dynnyrne and Mt Nelson.

How could the HCC risk placing in a compromised position the planners employed by the city, who are now in the invidious position of having to impartially assess various planning applications when the employer of those planners has given in-principle approval and encouragement, and, it appears to me, invested heavily in the decision?

How could the HCC, at the time of the signing of the City Deal, combine with the university in the knowledge that the university had not then conducted proper consultation or published feasibility studies or published detailed financial costings or even completed its grandiose ideas before rushing to encourage such an undertaking?

These actions represent a council that is supposedly accountable acting, in my opinion, in an unaccountable way. Council has combined with a body unaccountable to the taxpaying public, to produce a disastrous result.

I call upon the council to release the minutes of all the meetings that the Lord Mayor and councillors conducted with the university leading up to the council’s wholehearted commitment to this project.

I call upon the council to immediately cease any further implementation of this scheme.

I call upon the council to release any research or considerations the council embarked upon prior to in-principle agreeing to the scheme.

I call upon the council to tell us what exactly it agreed to when it agreed to the scheme, and how much the scheme has changed since council agreed to it, and if it has changed significantly and why it continues to agree to it.

I call upon you to tell us how council will cope if this multibillion-dollar absurd scheme flounders.

The least you can do is put it to a public vote.