We need to deliver more open space to support the growing population in Gordon.
Pictured at the top is a new open space at the top of Dumaresq Street, which council had resolved to deliver last year. We’re giving time for the grass to establish and we expect it to open later this week.
Pictured at the bottom is Gordon Glen at the bottom of Dumaresq Street. (West Gordon is really steep so it needs multiple parks to serve different pockets of the future population.) At the moment Gordon Glen is a little dated but there will be work on this space in the coming years to match the needs of new residents.
The State Government has announced today its Low- and Mid-Rise Housing Part 2 provisions.
What this means for Ku-ring-gai is that within 800m of Wahroonga, Turramurra, Pymble, Gordon, Killara, Lindfield and Roseville Station as well as St Ives Shopping Village, 3-storey townhouses and manor houses can be built in R2 zones, and 6-storey apartments can be built in R3 and R4 zones. This applies to Heritage Conservation Areas as well, but not Heritage Items.
The implication this has for residents near TOD zones is that it will probably add an additional level of transition from high to low [The details of this are being checked / confirmed with the Department of Planning in coming days.]. Previously there were fears from some residents that the council?s 5-storey TOD-alternative (with setbacks) would overshadow / overlook 1-2 storey homes. But with the formalisation of the State?s LMRH part 2 changes which we have known is coming (since November 2023), all of these ?impacted? residences (including those in HCAs, but with the exception of heritage items) may have the ability to become 3-storey themselves and I don?t believe that the future residents of these future 3-storey homes will be concerned about the 5-storeys next door. As for heritage items, I suspect that they can still be incorporated within larger developments in such a manner that the item is protected but the population increase and value still realised.
Another implication of this announcement is that Warrawee Station, as well as neighbourhood centres such as St Ives North, West Pymble, East Lindfield, Roseville Chase, Eastern Road and Princes Street are confirmed to not be impacted by these changes as originally implied by the State Government. (Residents in these areas may, however, potentially have access to dual-occupancy depending on where those changes land in the next 4 months).
Snippets of the State Government?s indicative mapping are provided, and a more detailed map is linked. Please note that these maps include the default TOD which may be superseded in coming months.
Please also note that the reasons why Council took the State Government to court over the TOD are not applicable to the LMRH provisions. Therefore I do not see any legal challenge arising from this.
This morning I was excited to check out the new kerb and guttering at Perth Avenue East Lindfield, which residents had been requesting since last decade.
The kerb and guttering was delivered at the cost of $773,500 as part of Council?s $9.1m Road Rehabilitation Program this financial year. Other large projects this year include retaining wall work at Station Street Pymble ($1.5m), Vernon Street South Turramurra ($1.1m), Braeside Street Wahroonga ($1.0m), Iona Avenue West Pymble ($659k), Halcyon Avenue Wahroonga ($655k) and St Johns Avenue Gordon ($564k).
Of course much of this work would have been cheaper to deliver upfront when the suburb was being established rather than retrofit at a later point in time – but this is what happens when infrastructure funding raised does not match what is genuinely required. We will face more of these challenges in the coming years as there has been disinterest from the state in backing up growth with infrastructure and funding.
If you have specific requests for kerb and guttering or footpaths in your part of Ku-ring-gai, feel free to email me at sngai@krg.nsw.gov.au though please recognise that with the limited funding available and the way that rates are constrained, we can only do so much each year and your specific request will be assessed and prioritised as part of an overall waiting list.
Some residents may know that I was not personally satisfied with any of the four new TOD scenarios put forward by Council last year. Each scenario had significant flaws – a symptom of the incredibly short timeframe given for preparing them – but it was necessary for us to act quickly to prevent the costly impacts of the state government?s ill-thought default. If we hadn?t forced an outcome through our legal action (a few hundred k), we would have been stuck with the much more costly impacts of the default TOD (tens of millions plus detriment to quality of life) which didn?t consider infrastructure bottlenecks, local character, or community consultation as required by law.
I?d like to thank the thousands of residents who provided us with feedback on these scenarios. You told us which ones you liked, which ones you hated, and your specific reasons why.
Last week our staff extensively took the councillors through this feedback and then presented us with a revised scenario. I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw because it felt to me that the staff had genuinely considered all feedback AND they had applied additional thought to identifying and remedying some of the inherent flaws of each scenario. There were even some adjustments that I had never considered and made me really excited (on residents? behalf)!
The draft revised scenario I saw last week was not perfect and there is still some finetuning to do over the coming week(s). But when it is ready, the intention is that the public will be briefly consulted a second time before we implement the proposal in or before May 2025.
There will still be some unhappy residents about the revised scenario, and it was never going to be possible to please everyone. But it is still much better than anything we have seen before and from my perpsective, we have to come up with something that would work best for the future residents of Ku-ring-gai rather than purely focus on the short-term needs of some residents (e.g. residents who want to maximise their own short term land value).
