CHALLENGE Southern Highlands director Terry Oakes Ash has called on Wingecarribee Council to reconsider its decision to abandon a plan to part of Apex Park in Bowral to build housing for people with disabilities.
Council voted in June 2006 to offer Argyle Housing the two blocks of land in Sheaffe Street, as well as $360,000 from the sale of land in Etheridge Street, Mittagong, in 2003.
The offer was subject to the property being used to house clients of Challenge Southern Highlands, some of whom travel daily from Campbelltown and Goulburn to work at the Challenge’s Welby Garden Centre.
But at last Wednesday’s meeting, the new council rejected a recommendation from its Local Environment Plan (LEP) sunset working group that the reclassification and rezoning of the Sheaffe Street site should proceed, voting instead to look for another site closer to the town centre.
Mayor Duncan Gair said council’s social planner considered the location unsuitable because it was socially isolated and without easy access to public transport.
Cr Paul Tuddenham said the reclassification should go ahead, arguing out that the land could remain in council ownership and that there were unlikely to be any suitable sites closer to the town centre.
“It may not be the perfect site, but it is land we do own and do not need to acquire,” he said.
“You’re not going to get much closer and to get anywhere else will cost a lot of money because we’ll have to buy it.”
He was supported by Cr Graham McLaughlin, who said the site did have access to bus transport, with a bus stop not far away.
For the full story see the Southern Highland News, Wednesday, December 24
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