One Tree Bay

One Tree Bay Development Proposal

Overview

The One Tree Bay proposal by Miltonbrook Pty Ltd envisages development of a new town on the undisturbed southern shore of St Georges Basin with a minimum of 2,000 dwellings/5,000 people, including a 4 storeys high commercial/retail centre with 16,000 square metres of floor space, which involves the clearing of 163 hectares (around 400 acres) of intact high conservation value forest at One Tree Bay. This loss is to be offset by rezoning 912 hectares of nearby highly constrained, largely undevelopable land as National Park.

Serious Infrastructure and Servicing Concerns with One Tree Bay Proposal

The One Tree Bay proposal was shoehorned into the Sussex Inlet Settlement Strategy more than 12 months after its public exhibition without any detailed additional assessment of its servicing and infrastructure requirements. As a consequence, the servicing and infrastructure implications of this proposed new town of 5,000 people on the shore of St Georges Basin are only now beginning to emerge.

The project documentation lodged with Shoalhaven Council and the Department of Planning indicated that the new settlement would be serviced with sewerage and reticulated water at the proponent’s expense. Setting aside the burning question of whether the proponent actually has sufficient funds to make good this commitment still leaves the technical feasibility unresolved. The One Tree Bay site is located on an untouched greenfields site several kilometres away from the existing Sussex Inlet sewerage system, making infrastructure and servicing issues of significant importance and cost. The proponent was advised at a May 2009 meeting with Shoalhaven Water (a subsidiary of Shoalhaven City Council) that there was no available capacity in the Sussex Inlet sewerage system, with no immediate prospect of any being available - and a further 160 unsold lots on the recently developed Taylors Rise subdivision will also require servicing.

In view of the lack of sewerage capacity, the idea of One Tree Bay being serviced by an on-site sewerage and re-use system has been canvassed. This would require significant design amendments, entailing additional dedicated land, engineering and ongoing maintenance costs, as well as raising significant issues, such as groundwater infiltration, cost-effectiveness, public liability and water quality protection, which have not been considered in any public project documentation prepared to date, and for which no costings have been provided.

To try and allay well-founded concerns over the significant negative water quality impacts of constructing a new town of 5,000 people on the hitherto undisturbed southern shore of St Georges Basin, Miltonbrook has relied on vague claims regarding “water sensitive urban design” (often referred to as WSUD), involving the use of gross pollutant traps, wetlands/detention basins, bio-retention swales and contour drains. However, Miltonbrook has not publicly released any detailed studies or costings, being content to provide half a page of soothing assurances lacking any real substance. The rezoning documentation supplied to Council failed to include a preliminary plan for WSUD, despite misleadingly indicating that such a plan was included at Attachment A (which was in fact a general urban design plan). It is not known whether Council has ever requested that this significant omission be rectified.

Miltonbrook’s reluctance to supply the preliminary WSUD diagram to Council has turned out to be well justified, since it attracted many comments and requests for clarification from the Departments of Lands, Water & Energy and Primary Industries when it was circulated to NSW Government agencies. Significant issues identified include :

-   some of the wetlands/detention basins are located within the existing 30 m dedicated public reserve/buffer zone, thereby compromising its effectiveness

-   at least one section of the bio-retention swale is shown as flowing uphill, and

-   at least 3 high flow discharge points (which have the most potential to pollute St Georges Basin with sediments and nutrients) actually bypass detention basins and pollutant traps.

It is evident that Shoalhaven ratepayers and the general public are being kept in the dark regarding critical infrastructure costings, effectiveness and viability for the One Tree Bay proposal. It is simply not acceptable to assert that such fundamental servicing, drainage and water quality protection issues can be magically resolved through as yet unseen assessments carried out after rezoning occurs – the local community, Shoalhaven ratepayers and NSW taxpayers need to have these uncertainties resolved before any decision is taken, to gain a clear idea of the costs, benefits and risks.

It is relevant to note that the NSW Government’s South Coast Regional Strategy sets out 8 broad sustainability criteria which must be fulfilled before any new towns or villages outside existing urban areas will be considered for development. The first of these criteria relates to infrastructure provision, with one of its stated benchmarks that provision of infrastructure (including utilities) is costed and economically feasible. On this basis alone, One Tree Bay fails at the first hurdle of the NSW government’s own sustainability criteria, ignoring for the moment the many other serious concerns with this proposal (see following section OTB and the SCRS)

The infrastructure information provided by Miltonbrook to date is clearly not a sufficient or reliable basis for Council to approve the proposed rezoning of this land for this currently prohibited development– it would abrogate Council’s responsibilities to Shoalhaven ratepayers and the local community who could be faced with unacceptable and/or unquantified risks and consequential financial, social and environmental costs.

SAC therefore calls on Shoalhaven City Council to reject the One Tree Bay rezoning application.

OTB and the South Coast Regional Strategy (SCRS)

The SCRS, released in by NSW Planning Minister Sartor in February 2007, is intended to provide the template and direction for planning and development of the NSW South Coast for the next 25 years. If One Tree Bay were to be approved, it would seriously erode the integrity of the SCRS, and thereby create a damaging precedent encouraging “open slather” development throughout the entire south coast region, to the benefit of a few and the cost of many.

The SCRS was obviously of key strategic concern for One Tree Bay, as it contained at least three potential hurdles to the proposal, as outlined below.

1) The SCRS states that no new towns or villages outside existing urban areas would be considered, unless there were compelling reasons and they could satisfy ‘sustainability criteria’ specified in Appendix 1.

This was seen as a significant threat to OTB by Miltonbrook, so they hired a Victorian based consultant to write a submission on their behalf to the NSW government seeking to have this provision removed from the draft SCRS when it was circulated for comment.

Following the failure of Miltonbrook’s attempt to have this troublesome provision removed, Miltonbrook have had to reluctantly concede that One Tree Bay is indeed a new town, with Miltonbrook CEO Neville Fredericks quoted in the South Coast Register of 6/3/09 as acknowledging that One Tree Bay constitutes a new town which can be justified by rubbery “sustainability criteria”. However, in spite of Mr Fredericks acknowledgement that One Tree Bay is indeed a new town, consultants hired by Miltonbrook continue to “spin” the proposal in planning documents submitted as being “a new sub-centre within the Sussex Inlet suburb”.

Miltonbrook have proceeded to hire other consultants to develop glossy submissions to show how the OTB proposal satisfies the SCRS  “sustainability criteria”, with the handover of land to National Parks repeatedly cited as the “compelling reason” to justify the development. This is exactly the same sort of approach that has recently been characterised as a “land bribe” by Justice Lloyd of the NSW Land & Environment Court, in connection with proposed coastal developments at Catherine Hill Bay and Gwandalan. The NSW Government has subsequently acknowledged that these approvals, as well that for a proposed new town of 20,000 people at Huntlee (near Branxton) are invalid.

However, the glossy submissions developed by consultants have not produced any substantive analyses of the proposed urban development, with fundamental servicing, drainage and water quality protection issues remaining unresolved and uncosted, as outlined in the preceding section  Serious Infrastructure & Servicing Concerns with One Tree Bay. The proposal therefore clearly fails to satisfy the SCRS sustainability criteria, and should therefore be rejected.

2) The SCRS indicated that it would support developments specified in local or area strategies, such as the Sussex Inlet Settlement Strategy.

The SCRS also indicated that the NSW government would only support urban areas which were included within a designated list of local plans, one of which was the Sussex Inlet Settlement Strategy (SISS). This created a problem for the proponents which they sought to resolve by having One Tree Bay included in the final SISS, despite the fact that it was not included in the draft SISS circulated for public comment, which therefore did not contain any consideration of the population, servicing, social or environmental implications of the One Tree Bay proposal.

To undertake a credible integration of the One Tree Bay proposal into the SISS would have required a major revision of the strategy to address these key issues, as One Tree Bay would more than double the existing population of Sussex Inlet, not counting the 50% population increase already projected in the SISS via other new developments for Sussex Inlet.

Rather than making the effort to have additional detailed One Tree Bay-relevant analyses included in the SISS, which would have explored important servicing, social and environmental questions, the proponent instead chose to lobby the previous Shoalhaven City Council (SCC) to simply amend a few words in sections 2.1.1 and 3.1.2 of the SISS to the effect that Council supported the proposal.

This minimal change was subsequently endorsed by the previous SCC, allowing the proponent to tick the box for the SISS without having to undergo any type of viability or servicing analysis, or answer any difficult or complex questions.

3) The SCRS prohibits new urban development in high conservation value areas.

The SCRS posed further problems for the OTB proposal arising from its provisions to protect the natural environment. The Strategy indicates that “Urban development, including further subdivision, will be directed away from areas known to be or likely to be important for conservation. Urban development will be located on largely cleared land or areas where only limited clearing of native vegetation with low conservation values is required.”

In addition the SCRS explicitly states that “new urban development is to be prohibited by local environmental plans on land assessed as being of high conservation value”, and includes a map which clearly designates that the headland proposed for clearing to make way for the One Tree Bay township as of high conservation value. In addition, the Department of Environment and Climate Change has also mapped the headland as being largely composed of high conservation value (HCV) forest.

Miltonbrook has sought to get round this clear-cut breach of the SCRS by simply defining it away. It has hired a consultant to undertake a survey which purportedly indicates that the headland is not of high conservation value. However, this survey is misleading because much of the surveyed transects were unrepresentative of the site as a whole, being either too close to the shore (where larger trees tend not to occur) or near existing roads, where previous clearing has been concentrated. Miltonbrook has also failed to follow official procedures specified where there is a difference of opinion as to whether high conservation value forest is present on private land. This biassed survey can therefore be ignored.