Brisbane City Council should listen to residents’ development concerns

Brisbane City Council is playing with fire when it comes to its planning decisions — especially with local and federal election outcomes hanging in the balance, writes Terry Sweetman.

AN ERUPTION of temporary fencing and a buzzabout of last-minute inspections this week seem to signal the end to a sorry saga that began during the Great Flood.

I refer to the Great Flood of 2011 that swept through a house at the end of our riverside street in St Lucia.

It not only washed away the comfort zone of the owners but it eroded confidence in the Brisbane City Council’s development processes.

I have only a peripheral interest in the fate of the house and the 1242sq m of land on which it sits, but have chronicled it because it seems symptomatic of much that is perceived to be wrong with our city.

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After the flood, the owners put it on the market for what was reported to be about $6 million but, oddly, nobody wanted to cough up that much to live in a demonstrable flood zone.

Somewhere down the track it was sold and earmarked for an apartment development.

The story heated up in 2012 when a developer was given approval to build 11 floors with 22 units and 25 car parks.

This, local residents believed, was outside of the area/height requirements of the Brisbane Town Plan but were told it “no longer represented the current thinking”.

The residents won some small concessions but under successive owners, development ambitions grew from 22 units, to 26, to 63 and then to an astounding 73 in 15 floors, with basement parking for 95 cars.

Former Brisbane City Council Planning Committee chairman Julian Simmonds. Picture: Tara Croser.

This was too much for even the council, which knocked back the proposal for reasons that seemed a little too slippery to grasp.

Julian Simmonds, then planning committee chairman and still councillor for the area, said the council was not satisfied an ancient fig tree on the property would not be harmed.

And, he said, it was not satisfied residents’ concerns about traffic had been adequately addressed.

However, Dominic Hudson, the council’s senior urban planner, was reading from a different script and listed four reasons for refusing the application.

Three of them were to do with vegetation and one was because some of the balconies were minuscule.

There was no mention of residents’ concerns about traffic or “impacts causedby the proposal’’.

There was much harrumphing about an appeal but it was dropped late last year, meaning none of the objections — real or imagined — were tested in court. Instead, developers won approval for yet another revised plan, this time for 14 floors with 34 three-bedroom apartments on 14 floors with four underground garages for 74 cars.

This is way better than 73 apartments but a lot worse than the original 22, and offers only marginal traffic improvement.

The controversy over the St Lucia property illustrates how Brisbane City Council’s planning decisions favour developers. Picture: AAP/Renae Droop

The “significant” fig tree remains although, despite conditions written into the approval document, neighbours are not so sanguine about its survival.

They remain defiant but all indications are that they are fighting a lost cause.

So, council has laboured mightily but delivered a result that probably pleases no one.

Neighbours remain angry about the trespass on their amenity, those further afield are nervous about the pedestrian, cycling and vehicular traffic ramifications during and after the build, successive developers have been unable to maximise returns on their investment, and the council has squandered an immeasurable amount of goodwill.

And, it has contributed to an accumulation of distrust and ill will across the city.

In this case, a succession of disgruntled or disillusioned owners, each taking a profit of some kind has anecdotally pushed the price of the land from somewhere near $6 million to close enough to $9 million.

That built into the financial foundations of the project must play a role in pushing up the asking price of the units, adding prospective owners to the list of the less-than-pleased.

Brisbane Lord Mayor Graham Quirk and Cr Julian Simmonds with the video game that was used to form the next City Plan. Picture: AAP/John Gass

I don’t underestimate the difficulty of balancing community concerns against commercial aspirations, but this and other instances around the city give rise to suspicions that the council has too little regard for its own regulations and too much regard for developers.

This ruckus in our street, with all its tones of Nimby-ism, has wider implications.

It has played its little bit in undermining the power base of the Liberal city council and Mayor Graham Quirk, but could have federal echoes as Simmonds makes a bid to replace Jane Prentice in Canberra.

He seems to have lost a lot of friends over his council role which raises the intriguing possibility of a good conservative independent stealing the seat.

The Liberal Party has already lost the local state of seat of Maiwar to a Green, so the real possibility of losing the federal seat of Ryan and/or power in the council is a big price to pay for a terminal case of development fever.

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