Byron Council has to be held to public account in relation to aspects of the current development approval underlying the West Byron development. Reviewing research reveals how imperative risk and safety processes have been contemptuously dismissed by Byron legal authorities, who are employed to address public safety (let alone ecological integrity), thereby hastening development approval and setting a very dangerous precedent for future developments on floodplains in the region. Still no flood-mitigation plan exists and no management plan addressing tonnages of fill. It must also be noted that hydrologist and Byron councillor Duncan Dey has publicly noted ‘peak flood levels do rise when fill is introduced into a floodplain’.
In his submission to Byron Council in 2018, Dailan Pugh notes: ‘The proposal is to fill most of the site to 0.5m above assessed flood level, with the importation of some 500,000 m3, though both DAs fail to identify the quality and source of the fill, or the impacts that thousands of truck movements will have on both traffic and road. This fill is likely to have high levels of suspended solids, organic material, and pollutants which, in high-rainfall events, will flow onto the properties of the three adjacent land owners to the south-west, yet the likely and potential impacts of this on the amenity of the landowners has not been considered in accordance with Clauses l and 3(c) of the Byron Shire LEP 1988, 98b Earthworks’. The new climate change epoch of 2022 has revealed flood levels experienced by Northern Rivers communities that far exceed recorded history! As such, the potential for existing Byron communities to undergo serious flooding are intensified by this development, which contemptuously dismisses existing safety legalities. In 2022 Dailan Pugh notes original fill levels ‘may have changed’.
Furthermore, The Echo (7 September) notes that, ‘One DA is owned by a “locals” consortium, who won considerable concessions behind closed doors at a court mediation with Council’s consultant lawyers’. Tom Vidal, a local landowner, was concerned about drainage and flooding for the DAs, and stated that cmpared to Terry Agnew ‘our local mates were not so understanding, …the secret court negotiations were woeful… to ask residents to make submissions to the court without notifying us that most points of contention (traffic, stormwater, drainage, social impacts etc, etc) were conceded already was quite unbelievable’.
This evidence is a stark example of contempt.
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