HELPING its employees become more independent is important to the people who run Challenge Southern Highlands.
Having independent accommodation for the adults with intellectual disabilities who work at Welby Garden Centre is a dream CSH general manger Tony McElhinney has been fighting for several years.
Wingecarribee councilors will hold an information session tonight on rezoning Apex Park in East Bowral so that one big house or two smaller houses can be built for CSH.
The last council set aside $386,000 in 2006 for the project but the current council put the project on the backburner in January.
Former deputy mayor and president of the Bowral ratepayers Association Nick Campbell-Jones said Apex Park was going to waste and the project for CSH could be built on two blocks of the park, leaving two blocks to remain as parkland.
Council needs to rezone the land as “operational” for the project to proceed and Mayor Duncan Gair has thrown his support behind the project.
The mayor is currently on two weeks leave, recuperating at Noosa on the Sunshine Coast after a tough first nine months in the saddle.
Mr McElhinney said once the project got the green light it would cost close to $1 million.
He said employees of the garden centre don’t receive adequate support from government services and the Sheaffe Street project would be a major boost to increasing their quality of life.
Caretaker general manger and environment and planning manger of strategic planning Mark Pepping said the process for reclassifying the land would take close to six months, meaning the project wouldn’t get underway until 2011.
Mr McElhinney said realistically it would take close to a year to raise the $600,000 gap to build the project but said CSH would apply for whatever state or federal grants it might qualify for.
The project was knocked back by the current council because it decided it wasn’t centrally located enough.
But Mr Campbell-Jones said there was a bus stop down the road from the park and it was in one of the fastest growing areas of the Highlands.
Welby Garden Centre employs 42 people who have intellectual disabilities ranging from cerebral palsy to aspersers.
Mr McElhinney said the project was aiming to house close to 10 people and help the garden centre employees become completely independent from their parents, who usually have to look after them well into their adulthood.
CSH is in the process of starting another garden centre in Goulburn and Mr McElhinney hinted Goulburn-Mulwaree Council had been bending over backwards to help the project get up and running.
“They offered us a disused bowling green, which is ideal,” he said.
“It has been a very different type of support.”
Mr Campbell-Jones said he would like to see Council give CSH the land with a peppercorn rent ($1 a week, for example).
CSH has been hit hard by the economic downturn and Mr McElhinney said donations were down by almost 50 per cent over the last year.
“We are a community organisation and we need community support,” Mr McElhinney said.
Mr Pepping said the funds for the project were still in council’s coffers and Cr Gair said he supported re-zoning the land to get the project up and running.
He said he was asking his fellow councillors to view the proposal in a “positive manner” at the information session.
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