Ed,
There is an old saying that, if you want to understand today, you have to know what happened yesterday.
These words of a past sage currently need to be understood by all Lower Clarence people with regard to C.V. Council’s latest proposal to possibly encourage more and higher building developments on Yamba’s iconic Hill and in the main commercial area around Yamba Street where new buildings could be built as high as 18 metres or up to an estimated six storeys.
To realise this proposal, about 70 existing homes on the hill around Agar, Harwood, Link and Yamba Streets would be demolished to allow construction of residential flats, town houses and multi-dwelling buildings up to 12 metres in height on small lots of only 400 square metres or less.
Council’s latest Draft Housing Strategy and Affordable Housing Policy proposes in a 158-page document that a total of 152 new homes could eventuate on the Hill with more new apartments above shops in the CBD.
These ideas are not, however, new. When I was secretary of the Yamba Angourie Wooloweyah Community Association before amalgamation some 20 years ago, the previous forerunning Maclean Shire Council tried to implement a similar policy which failed hopelessly, causing major protests from large swathes of concerned and angry ratepayers.
On that occasion, the plan also included requiring all owners of property in designated lanes on Yamba Hill to “donate” a 1.5 metre streetside strip of their land to Council to enable 3-metre lane widening and street parking for future high-rise developments. The affected landowners were also to be held responsible for meeting the costs of relocating all affected kerbside water, telephone, power and rainwater services.
In addition, if landowners wished to place their properties on the market, a Section 149 Zoning Certificate would be attached to the property’s deeds, warning potential buyers of the impending cost of development.
After various YAWCA and other official meetings in Yamba, Maclean Shire Council was originally forced in 2002 to do a major red-faced backflip and withdraw its proposals.
In our earnest battle with Council over further Yamba Hill development, I met on Yamba Hill with Professor Bruce Thom, chairman of the Coastal Council of N.SW., who warned that any further major density development on the Hill would be a great disaster.
This very senior N.S.W. bureaucrat pointed out that, over the years, many coastal holiday shacks or houses had been demolished on Yamba’s surfside coastline and other sand-based hills and had been dangerously replaced by buildings too large for the local landscape and the future security of local inhabitants.
Professor Thom advised that, unless we take a more strategic, place-based approach to urban planning, we would continue down the path of incremental poor urban values and safety which are linked to those natural features of significance to Yamba’s coastal dwellers and visitors.
He also believed that the public in Yamba and elsewhere in similar situations were becoming increasingly aware that the qualities that make our coast attractive and safe were rapidly being eroded by sub-standard development as a result of poor local government planning and decision-making.
I was particularly interested in meeting Professor Thom, knowing that Yamba Hill is basically an unstable combined nature and man-made sand hill. We at YAWCA were also aware of how the hill had suffered several landslips over the years and that it had originally been stabilised for only lighter single-storey development.
At one time in recent history, Manly Hydraulics had to be called in from Sydney to lay equipment to gauge and deliver advance warnings about possible slippages in the Pilot Street area. This was also highlighted by the slippage at the river end of Clarence Street which slid down well over the eastern boundary of Yamba’s central caravan park, completely blocking Harbour Street for a time.
It could be said that our Council has an insatiable hunger for more rate monies from Yamba properties, hence the desire to develop the soil-filled West Yamba floodplain and now Yamba Hill.
This situation was made obvious some years ago when Maclean Shire Council officers recommended that Yamba’s total population must eventually be 100 per cent bigger than it is today to ensure a “financially secure Council.”
Yamba’s residents had voted in 2002 for the town’s then population of 5,500 residents being eventually capped for all time at 8,000 due to the lack of land and services for equitable building development purposes.
The Council, on the other hand, flatly refused this figure provided by an official Council-supported town-wide referendum. It believed that a target of 17,000 should rather be set but just what figure the current Council may have in mind is not as yet publicly known.
All this encourages the writer to think that those who don’t remember the past, are generally condemned to repeat it.
Oscar Tamsen, Yamba