Kelsey Munro reports the planning and 'consultation' cost $623,000.
There's something unfair about the way Council can throw so much public money at winning support for its own projects while the unpaid public has to struggle along in their spare time to oppose them.
The consultation process is fundamentally broken, a deep gulf yawning between street-level reality and Council's ivory tower view.
Awesome effort.
ReplyDeleteThanks and congratulations to you and all involved.
Thanks Bob. It surely requires effort to give up all that personal time working for nothing while you fight highly paid bureaucrats. That's how they beat you, by sheer persistence until people give up.
ReplyDeleteOn top of that, community politics always threatens to undo local groups, who are not paid or officially bound by corporate constraints, unlike their public servant counterparts. Congrats to all involved in this case for hanging in until a result!
What a loss! The gardens are desperately shabby and urgently in need of an upgrade -- including better layout.
ReplyDeleteI suppose you whinged about the Rushcutters Bay Park upgrade too? And look how well that turned out.
Sydney is badly being left behind by other state capitals: I don't think most locals have any idea how far its slipped.
Hi anonymous,
ReplyDeleteYour belief that endless upgrades will bring Sydney up with other state capitals is amusing. Your opinion belies the many heritage treasures of the world that are such simply because they have been left to grow old gracefully, growing fascinating patinas.
As Jane Jacobs said. "Newness, and its superficial gloss of well-being, is a very perishable commodity." Especially in Fitzroy Gardens where the Ibis would continue to shit on the new, glossy paving and incongruously Barcelona-inspired seating (In Barcelona, age is cool, some popular old bars not having dusted their chandeliers for 150 years).
Your assertion that the new layout would be better than the present one ignores the stupidity of opening up a corridor from the entertainment precinct to the residential area of Elizabeth Bay, central to the new design. Or hadn't you realised how dumb that would be? Not to mention the destruction of scores of trees. You truly are a ning-nong, victim of Sydney's almost fatal renovation disease.