Madeleine Green, Myocum
There are creative ways to make a dollar in Byron. Turn your place into a holiday destination. Turn your place into a drug rehab centre. Turn your place into a transport terminal. And now, the latest growth area, turn your place into a wedding venue.
I don’t object to people running a business, but when the business runs in a designated residential area, cheek-by-jowl with neighbours who have a right to domestic and social amenity, and when these private businesses disrupt our neighbourhoods and communities, I object.
The council tries to placate and appease our many legitimate objections by imposing ‘conditions’ on these contentious DAs – so few of which it can actually enforce!
Who polices potentially inebriated guests driving the unfamiliar, crappy roads of Byron environs? Who will be there to force up to 150 guests into fleets of minibuses, as the mooted alternative? Or to deem that there’s way too much traffic on your single country lane, as all the ancillary services descend on the venue, leading up to, and on the day of, the ‘event’?
So, harried residents are left to police ‘bad behaviour’, by being forced by the council to ‘gather evidence’, take photos etc. Not our role!
How about the council not approving anything for which it cannot give detailed enforcement strategies? Or better still, how about not approving commercial operations in residential areas that negatively impact the quality of life and safety of the residents?
How about DAs requiring a ‘community social impact study’, as well as an ‘environmental impact’ study? And the misleading title of the DAs – ‘Temporary Use of Land’ which means that these events can be run up to 20 times a year!
With a new council I look forward to the possibility of community interests being slightly more important than the profits of private individuals.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
