City planners recommend approving the Gold Coast’s first wave park at Parkwood
The Gold Coast is set to get its first wave park, with City Planning officers recommending approval of a $300 million surfing tourist attraction in the northern suburb of Parkwood.
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The Gold Coast is set to get its first wave park, with City planning officers recommending approval of a $300 million surfing tourist attraction in the northern suburb of Parkwood.
After an exhaustive three years of planning, officers backed approval “with conditions” which include an operational management plan setting opening hours for stages of the mega project.
Components include a 300m-long surf park, a $10m refurbished golf course, a hotel, 225 residential units and a food and beverage district including a brew house.
The Parkwood Village site is currently home to a golf course and the Gold Coast Titans rugby league club.
Councillors will vote on the recommendation at Thursday’s planning committee meeting.
Those in favour argue the development would provide more entertainment and leisure options on the 56ha Napper Road site along with employment, longer term economic viability for the golf course and extra housing.
Officers said the proposal includes 16 new buildings, and modifications to existing facilities.
“The wave pool has capacity to have 75 persons surfing per hour and can cater for a range experience levels,” officers said.
“Surrounding the wave pool is the beach precinct which includes resort style pools, sun loungers and cabanas where patrons can order food and drinks,” officers wrote.
The tourism precinct could attract between 150,000 to 300,000 visitors each year.
Proponents sought to operate the wave pool from 4am to 11pm Monday to Sunday. Other commercial uses would be between 5am and 2am aligning with existing hours.
Officers said it was considered necessary to take a conservative approach in relation to operating hours and conditions have been recommended to “reasonably restrict hours”.
Technical reports show flood storage will be maintained even in the worst possible scenarios.
“Negligible flood impacts have been demonstrated,” officers wrote.
Parkwood Village managing director Luke Altschwager said a huge amount of community consultation occurred six months prior to the legally required public notification process.
“In fact, my town planner tells me that there has been more community engagement and consultation undertaken on this project than any other in his 30 year career,” he said.
“Although there were a range of opinions about the project, both positive and negative, there was certainly more positive than negative comment, especially when we were successful in dealing with a range of misconceptions about the project.
“This is reflected in the formal community submissions that were sent to council.”
Mr Altschwager said the City would not allow a project like this development to go ahead if there were potential flood impacts.
“In fact, the assessment process around flood has been incredibly rigorous. Our project not only meets the standard of no flood storage impacts, we have increased flood storage to the tune of approximately 26,000 cubic metres across the site.
“We have also made sure there is no impacts downstream or upstream of the project.
“This has been extensively modelled by our expert consultant and council has undertaken a comprehensive review, which we understand involved their highly experienced hydraulic engineers as well as another leading expert that conducted a peer review with their engineers.”
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