MEMO FROM MAYOR TO BATS

Council signs off on tree removal as Cr Manning shares CBD dream

A LUXURY slice of the CBD will no longer double as the city’s central bat district with flying foxes’ resort accommodation destined for the wood chipper.

Cairns Regional Council has given the all-clear for the Novotel Cairns Oasis Resort to cut down 13 trees on its Lake St property as part of a landscaping project.

Mayor Bob Manning said the best result would be for flying foxes to leave the city centre and return to the ridges.

“What I would love to see is if we could send an email to the bats or the flying foxes and say why don’t you move back onto the mountains,” he said.

“Because then you will not be stressed by cars and lights and cranes and the business of the city going on.”

Cr Manning said the bats would be better off in their more natural environment.

“You’ll be doing what you should be doing, which is propagating out there, spreading seeds and making more stuff grow – that’s a much better place for you, “Cr Manning said.”

He said it was a matter of balancing the ecology and economy and hundreds of jobs relied on allowing development to happen.

“If we had two or three 14foot crocodiles that moved up into the drains in the city, would they be left there?,” he said.

“No, they’ve got to be taken out. This is a matter, always, about getting the balance.”

Only Division 5 Cr Richie Bates voted against the approval at yesterday’s council meeting – not out of environmental concern but because he feared the bats would simply move elsewhere in the city.

“The reality is, when we pull those trees out of the city, those flying foxes are urbanised and they’ll return to the same district,” he said.

“It was only half-an-hour ago I had a phone call from a business owner at the Pier Marketplace. He’s concerned about the flying foxes now making roosts in new trees in the CBD.”

Cr Manning said he considered himself a conservationist but suggested sometimes ecological puritanism was out of sync with economic reality.

“If you’re telling me we can’t do anything, we’ve just got to let this matter take a natural course, then there’s a point where that will become unsustainable,” he said.

“They’ve got a large investment in this city.”

Cr Manning said Novotel would be competing in about 12 months with three new hotels in proximity.

Novotel still needs to win federal and state approvals to remove the plants, including mango, poinciana and tulip trees.