TMR pays Clive Desbois $900k over resumed land for Mackay Ring Road

A Mackay region landowner forced to sell off part of his property for the $565m Ring Road project has won a long battle for compensation for the resumed area.

A Glenella landowner forced to sell off part of his property for the Mackay Ring Road will be paid almost $1m in compensation for the resumed area.

In August 2016 the Department of Transport and Main Roads took back 1.934 hectares of land from Clive Desbois’s Bruce Highway adjoining property ahead of the $565m project’s construction.

He was one of a number of landowners in the area forced to fully or partially sell their property for the highly anticipated bypass road.

Mr Desbois applied to the Land Court of Queensland to determine his compensation entitlement for the resumed land.

A recent court judgment revealed Mr Desbois was pushing for $1,702,000 while TMR claimed it was only $67,000.

“The difference arises out of the parties’ conflicting positions on the highest and best use … of the land before it was resumed,” President Fleur Kingham said.

Mr Desbois argued the space was to be a service station/truck stop, with a land value of $750,000/ha.

“DTMR says it was grazing and valued it at $22,100/ha,” Ms Kingham said.

TMR argued planning and traffic safety issues would have prevented Mr Desbois from securing approval to use the area for a service station/truck stop.

“The court is not required to decide, as a fact, whether the planning authority would approve the use or the conditions of approval,” Ms Kingham said.

Part of Clive Desbois’s Glenella property was forcibly sold, in part, to the QLD Government for the Mackay Ring Road.

“The court must decide how a hypothetical prospective developer would have viewed the potential to use the land for that purpose in settling on the sale price.”

Mr Desbois had argued before the land was resumed he was approached by two people interested in developing a service station.

Service station experts called by both parties assessed the land against eight criteria, and agreed it achieved an eight out of either network assessment score, making it attractive to a large first tier oil company or developer, the judgment stated.

Ms Kingham found a service station/truck stop was “a realistic potential use for the disputed area”.

“The site would be very attractive to a developer, and the hypothetical developer would be advised it had good prospects of obtaining planning approval and reasonable prospects of a traffic safety condition,” she said.

Ms Kingham awarded Mr Desbois $948,961 in compensation, which included $781,385 loss in land value, $83,576.08 interest and $84,000 for disturbance.