The extraordinary meeting of Council on Thursday May 12 was aimed at getting the draft Coastal Zone Management Plan out on public exhibition for just over the minimum three weeks required under the Coastal Protection Act of 1979. Most of Council’s strategic documents get exhibited for a couple of months, not three weeks. The public have not yet seen the draft, which proposes building rock walls along the beach at Belongil (stronger than the current private ones).
The draft plan ignores the long-term effects of walls, like sacrificing the sandy beach in front of the walls and damaging the shorebird nesting area north-west of them. Unbelievably, it sets examining such issues as something for the future. The 2016 draft is a Bjelke-Petersen ‘don’t you worry about that’ plan.
It also ignores the fact that future generations will pay forever to keep the wall intact after storms until a smarter generation wakes up to the fact that fighting nature is unsustainable. Most modern countries are currently buying back privatised water frontage. Here in the colony, this dinosaurian plan proposes the opposite.
Four of your nine councillors believe the draft plan should get maximum exposure and that the public need to understand what is to be sent to NSW planning minister Rob Stokes on their behalf for him to certify into ‘law’. After the meeting on Thursday, three of us lodged a rescission motion against the exhibition process. This was announced at the end of the meeting.
A majority councillor with a legal background then lodged with the general manager a complaint under Section 440F(1)(e) of the Local Government Act. He says that our act of lodging a rescission motion ‘is intended to prevent the proper and effective functioning of the council’. He asks the GM to advise us to withdraw the motion. The GM has responded by advising that while the rescission motion is valid, there may be a case to answer under s440F.
That’s how desperate the majority councillors are to get their CZMP past you, the public, with as little scrutiny as can be arranged. When exhibition does start, please consider making a submission against it.
Byron Shire Cr Duncan Dey, Main Arm
The sand at Belongil is stable, despite walls being present for decades. Why is the new wall going to cause more damage? It doesn’t make sense. One expert report has shown that the Belongil shoreline has oscillated within a 50m range for thousands of years. So without the sand mining and the groynes in town Belongil would never have needed protection.
The bottom line is that the Belongil spit is an important economic and cultural part of the community you are responsible for protecting. So what is your alternative plan? To have no plan and just stall solutions forever? Or to simply wipe the spit from the map? To benefit whom? Or have another go at planned retreat which has never actually been a plan and is not legal or beneficial to anyone?
Should the Noosa spit also be removed? And perhaps the entire Gold Coast, and for that matter pretty much any beach in any populated location anywhere in the world. Beaches are dynamic and need to be stabilized when you build a town on them.
Are you also advocating the removal of rocks in town and evacuation of Jonson and Lawson st?
The opposing councillors are simply playing popular politics – playing upon fear about ‘destroying the beaches’ which is nonsense.
The community should read the information and get informed. I think the more educated people become the more they will realize this is the right plan.