At Weddin Shire Council's ordinary monthly meeting on Thursday, 15 May, the reclassification of community land to operational land was in focus.
Councillors considered a report which recommended that Council endorsed the removal of Site 7 being Lot 133 DP 1081488 Stan McCabe Drive Grenfell, from the current Planning Proposal lodged with the Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure; and endorse a separate Planning Proposal being lodged with the Department of
Planning, Housing and Infrastructure for the reclassification of the lot from community land to operational land including the removal of its public reserve status.
This motion was carried after Council heard from the Director of Environmental Services and spoke on the matter.
The Director of Environmental Services Luke Sheehan said as Council would be aware that a planning proposal was approved by council to send off to the department in January to reclassify 16 allotments owned by Council from community land to operational land.
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Mr Sheehan said the department contacted Council the week before the ordinary monthly meeting to identify that site 7 a further process has to be undertaken as it contains a public reserve.
Mr Sheehan said this process includes going right through to get the governor's approval, which would likely extend the assessment time for the planning proposal, including the other 15 lots.
Mr Sheehan said it was suggested from the department that Council would separate lot 7 from the proposal and doing it as an individual planning proposal.
This would likely result in a quicker process, a gateway determination, Mr Sheehan said, which is an initial check from the department to say it would be fine to keep going with the planning proposal.
This does not give any approvals at that stage, Mr Sheehan said, as it would have to come back to Council and they have to go through a whole community consultation process as a part of that.
Mr Sheehan said if either proposals get through the gateway determination there is a whole community consultation process where the community can have their say as to whether they agree or don't agree to any of those sites progress any further.
As part of this process, there would have to be a public hearing process for each of the proposals.
Councillor Colleen Gorman asked if potentially all of these blocks would be residential in the future, or if the bigger ones would be industrial.
Mr Sheehan said there's actually no change to zones with those blocks.
"All it is is just the classification of the sites. So classification, you've got community or operational," he said.
"If council doesn't by resolution or within a certain time frame, I think it's three months from memory of purchasing a property, it automatically becomes community land."
Mr Sheehan said the problem they have is that they have residential allotments where there are current houses, including Council owned units in East Street, which are classified as community land when they should be classified as operational land.
Mr Sheehan said the idea is to change the classification of the land, what can be done with it, and not change the zone, which is a separate issue.
