Further to our post below regarding Council’s Extraordinary General Meeting on Tuesday 12 September to decide whether or not to support Montefiore’s Planning Proposal – we’re delighted to report that Councillors voted 5 to 2 against sending the Proposal through to the Department of Planning’s Gateway Determination.
 
Many speakers pointed to the deficiencies in the Proposal which fell far short of Planning Department guidelines for a Gateway Determination, even though Council’s own report had also identified some of these issues while still recommending that the Proposal was ‘adequate’!
 
Among the serious problems raised were the questionable use of the SP2 Infrastructure category in order to allow the increased 6-storey building height, the absence of community consultation and the lack of adherence to our Local Environmental Plan ‘to maintain and enhance the character and identity of established neighbourhoods in Hunters Hill by regulating the use and development of land’.
 
Individual Councillors were fully engaged with the debate which resulted in Councillor Williams’ motion that Council did not support the Planning Proposal for reasons including the lack of strategic merit, failure to meet site-specific merit, relevant Government guidelines or community expectations.
 
All credit is due to members of the Montefiore Community Action Association who spent many hours poring over hundreds of pages of documents to bring to light the deficiencies that informed the debate.  We are pleased to have been involved with this win for the community and look to the applicant to ensure that any subsequent Planning Proposal for this site will be much more sympathetic to the local character and heritage of our area.