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).
