Dailan Pugh, Byron Bay.
I am disgusted with Council’s attempt to shift blame for their failure to prepare a Development Control Plan (DCP) for West Byron onto the state government (Echonetdaily 7/6/2017 Planning minister silent over West Byron development control plan).
On March 6, 2015, Echonetdaily reported that preparation of the DCP had been handed back to Council with only 60 days to prepare it. In this timeframe mayor Simon Richardson claimed it was Council’s intention to ‘ensure that anything that gets on that site is absolute world’s best practice.’
The article also quoted Tamara Smith, now the member for Ballina, as stating ‘The Greens are committed to local communities being able to plan their own futures and to delivering a planning framework that can’t be bypassed by cashed-up developers’.
Why is it that more than two years later Council has only just commenced peer reviews ‘on the issue of frogs, koalas, traffic and water and flood management’, and the developers have been allowed to bypass our incompetent Council?
While the Nationals foisted the West Byron abomination upon the community, the Greens have squandered their chance to protect the habitat of the Wallum Sedge Frog, to maintain a habitat link vital for the survival of Byron’s koalas, to stop further degradation of the Belongil estuary, and to meet their promise of world’s best practice.
