I am shocked by Cr Rose Wanchap’s apparent lack of understanding of planning processes and support for locking our remaining koalas up in a compound for tourists to gawk at.
The minister for planning is poised to approve a zoning plan for West Byron that specifically identifies where various types of development can occur, as well as a detailed Development Control Plan (DCP) that specifies the form and density of that development. It is all over at that stage bar the shouting.
Council will have extremely limited ability to alter any proposal that complies with the zoning and DCP. Rose is naive if she believes that Council will be able to direct how this subdivision will look as it is the zoning and DCP that decide that; Council will just be a rubber stamp.
Given that Rose is now supporting the rezoning of a third of the core koala habitat, along with 70 per cent of the needed buffers, for housing and shops, it will be all over for the koalas too.
I find Rose’s alternative of putting the surviving koalas in a ‘sanctuary’ as a tourist attraction repugnant. I am particularly disgusted that it now seems that the dominant development bloc in Council intends to vote down the Byron Coastal Koala Plan of Management in favour of rounding up our surviving koalas into this compound.
Our council seems to be reaching record lows.
Dailan Pugh, Byron Bay
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