By Jenel Hunt
About 30 people gathered at the Killarney Senior Citizens Hall for the Connecting With Council meeting held last week (12 April).
All councillors and directors were present for the session, which ranged across a number of subjects during the two-hour timespan.
The topics brought up by Killarney people included the possibility of council charges being waived or reduced so certain town blocks could be deamalgamated, the Urban Design Framework that was recently completed for the town, flooding problems due to drainage failure, Killarney people’s desire for a standalone library and council’s treatment of Killarney residents as second-grade citizens.
One of the vocal residents was Brian Thomas, who wanted to know if blocks that had previously been amalgamated in the town area could be deamalgamated without all the costs that were normally associated with such an action.
Cr Ross Bartley said the owners who had amalgamated the blocks had done so to dodge CED (effluent disposal) charges. He said deamalgamation came with conditions like curb and channelling and significant road widening.
When asked directly, Director of Planning and Environmental Services Scott Riley said the council could consider a reduction in the charges as it was one way to improve the ‘yield of the urban footprint’.
Brian, who with his wife Justine Hankin has an application before council for a building to be moved to a block in the main street, also had the Urban Design Framework in his sights.
“I’ve pulled this apart. As I understand it this is the final report that council will adopt for our sustainable growth in Killarney. But the priority is unanimously the streetscape. You’re putting in furniture and taking out car parking. Ratepayers’ money has gone into a plan that doesn’t support sustainable growth and development in Killarney. I have a real issue with that.”
He queried talk of a bypass that would take massive amounts of money and was probably ‘pie in the sky stuff’.
Scott Riley disagreed that the UDF was a final report for adoption.
“The concepts you see in the urban design are just that – concepts. Any individual project has its own life, its own scope, its own project management and its own consultation process that has to be worked through.” He also emphasised, “At this point of time there’s no indication there will be a bypass in Killarney. I want to make that quite clear.”
Mayor Cr Pennisi said there was a significant amount of consultation with the community for the urban design and council did not seek to control the outcomes.
“It’s your plan – from the community. It’s not our plan,” he said.
“We put an amount of money for the urban design and then go out to the public and say, what is it you’d like to do. We only have a certain amount of money available and we have a number of these frameworks around the region. I don’t think everything in that plan could get delivered in my lifetime.“
Spokesperson for a library in Killarney Nadia Horneman said a fully functional council-run library was what people wanted. Currently Killarney people felt like second-class citizens because they were receiving books that had been culled from the Warwick library.
She said the group would appreciate knowing the answers to the survey the council had conducted about library services in Killarney.
The survey had only closed on Friday and results were not yet available.
Another person who spoke to the library topic said there was a real opportunity to have a council presence in Killarney and to provide additional services, for example, have a community room at the library available at no cost for different community groups to use. On different days of the week the room could be used as an artists’ studio, a women’s shed or for a card playing afternoon, she said.
Andrea Brosnan agreed that Killarney people were being treated as second-class citizens and objected to the council describing Killarney as a village.
“You’ve been calling us a village. Does anyone else feel erked by that? A village is a pub and a shop. We’re much more than that.
“I have to go to Stanthorpe to see the physio and I see a brand new art gallery. They had a perfectly fine art gallery already. Why’s the money being spent there? Why isn’t it being spent on the rest of us? I feel like we just have road blocks put in our way.
“We work really hard to be like Chicken Little. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’ll do it myself.’
“We’ve done it all ourselves and it would be really, really nice to feel like we were being supported.”
The audience clapped at that.
