A growing Belconnen Town Centre needs its own renewal authority, says council. Photo: Ian Bushnell.
Community council representatives have called for town centre renewal authorities to stop piecemeal development and ensure master plans are implemented instead of gathering dust.
The issue of planning and community engagement was raised by independent MLA Fiona Carrick in a Budget Estimates hearing on Tuesday (22 July), striking a nerve with the council representatives who said town centres were being shortchanged as the City Renewal Authority received extra budget funding for its ongoing work in the CBD and inner north.
Belconnen Community Council (BCC) already called in its budget submission for some sort of authority or body to oversee development in a town centre way ahead of population projections.
BCC chair Lachlan Butler told the hearing the ACT Government consulted widely to create the Belconnen Town Master Plan of 2016, but all the problems it identified remained.
“There’s no part of government that’s genuinely responsible and held accountable for delivering what’s in the master plan, and that master plan talks about a population of 8500 people in the town centre by 2031. We met that by 2021,” he said.
“But the plan hasn’t been actioned. It’s a very, very nice document … but nothing’s happened from it, and that’s one of the reasons why one of our key recommendations is for a Belconnen renewal authority or some sort of interagency task force that can actually deliver what the town centre master plan said it would.”
Woden Valley Community Council treasurer Rachel Thompson also backed calls for a renewal authority to guide a holistic approach to planning and development in its town centre.
“Obviously with all of the additional high rises that have been put in there, it just seems to be piecemeal, and block by block as opposed to looking at it holistically, so we absolutely would encourage a renewal authority or something of that nature to look at it holistically,” she said.
Weston Creek Community Council committee member Simone Hunter said the council had specifically requested at the budget roundtable that a district planner work with it.
“If you’ve got a district plan, we want someone from the ACT Government who will work as a sole contact point to work with us so that we can help deliver that district plan and reach all the other goals that you have regarding missing middle housing,” she said.
Greens MLA Jo Clay says there is $12 million for the City Renewal Authority in the budget. Photo: Michelle Kroll.
Greens MLA Jo Clay said the government response to requests for more renewal authorities than just for the city was that the CRA was funded by business and businesses in those town centres would not want to pay.
But Ms Clay noted that there was $12m in the budget for the City Renewal Authority.
Ms Thompson said this funding and attention to the city felt quite unfair because a lot of the CBD had already been renewed.
“It seems like there’s an ongoing wheel of renewal in the city … and no renewal happening anywhere else,” she said.
“So if Belconnen needs a renewal authority, Southside definitely needs a renewal authority.”
On the question of community engagement, Molonglo Community Forum convenor Ryan Hemsley said it was only any good if it brought results.
He said all the workshops, roundtables and nice pictures meant nothing if the only product of that engagements fell over at the first barrier.
“We’ve seen that happen in the Molonglo Valley very recently with the failure of the Coombs and Wright village tender process and the Whitlam local centre process,” Mr Hemsley said.
“People in the Molonglo Valley took quite a bit of time out of their lives to participate in the engagement processes that led to the formation of those community-led design and place frameworks.
“There was a lot of faith, a lot of belief that after the debacle that was the Coombs shops, we’d learned the lesson and we’d be looking to ensure that we select developers for these sites that actually have proven project delivery capabilities.”
He said that after years of work it was incredibly disheartening and corroded people’s willingness to be involved in future engagement.
Ms Thompson said engagement needed to be a two-way process in which the community’s input was accepted, not consigned to a report for nothing to happen.
