North West Growth Precinct
The family home flooded because they live next door to development
James and Nadine lived in Harkness Road in Oakville, squarely in the area we call Vineyard Stage 1, a location of intensive subdivision caused by the North West Growth Sector.
Their home was nearly, but not quite at the top of a hill. The developers over the road had already razed the houses that had stood there since the 1970s – family homes that had stood on acreage properties at the crest of that hill, and had eaten into the land like you'd take the top off an egg.
Prior to the bulldozers arriving, rainwater drained off the top of the hill equally in all directions. But since the excavations began, the hilltop opposite was now a shallow, muddy basin. But that basin now had a spout, and the spout was pointed squarely at James and Nadine's home, which sat at the bottom of a sloping driveway.
When the rains came in March 2022, that water filled the basin, which had been constructed with no sedimentation control, and poured out of its lowest point – the spout opposite their home. A muddy slurry ran through their home to a depth of some inches. James and Nadine's property were ruined, and they estimate the damage into the tens of thousands of dollars. Recent arrivals to the home, they had not yet taken out insurance.
This story is a tragedy. It parallels that of many other Hawkesbury home owners on lower land whose houses were also flooded out by the rising of the river to 13.7m at Windsor, a height not seen since March 1978.
But James and Nadine's story is distinct in two respects. The first is that this house had stood there for decades, and the elevation in Harkness Road meant the property had never flooded before. It was well above the riverbank properties that flooded in early 2021 and March 2022.
The second reason, and the reason James and Nadine have engaged me to advocate for them, was the substandard response they had received from Hawkesbury City Council.
James and Nadine never wanted to go public with their story, until months had elapsed and they came to the conclusion that publicity was the only way they could get answers to their questions.
Timeline:
First week of March - rain event, home flooded.
Second week of March - Council contacted seeking help
25th March - Clr Lyons-Buckett and myself contacted about non-response from Council.
28th March - I attend the Harkness Road property and record video, part of which is in the main video above and which was sent privately to Council staff to lay out the problem clearly.
12th April - Clr Lyons-Buckett and myself speak directly to the General Manager after a Council meeting to ask for a response. One is promised.
20th April and 13th May - Having had no response from Council, Councillors are again asked to chase the matter. I speak to our Director of Planning by phone.
13th May - An email from the General Manager to James and Nadine says "I’ll follow this up with my team and get back to you as soon as I can."
June 3rd - James and Nadine decide to go public given the complete lack of a satisfactory response from Council.
June 14th - The Hawkesbury Post makes a media request directly to Council. It is not answered by date of this publication (June 21st).
Three months without a satisfactory answer. This is not good enough.
As a Councillor, I pledge to represent residents when they have issues with Council. I'm not here to defend Council when the level of customer service they deliver is not up to standard.
Who wears the liability here?
- Is it the developers? They've now written to James and Nadine and told them all communication needs to be through their insurers.
- Is it the contractors? The excavations they performed allowed water to pool on the site and pour through a home that had never flooded before. When I visited the site in March, no sedimentation controls were present. When I visited on June 3rd, I could see they had belatedly been installed.
- Is liability with Council? Were there conditions of consent that were not enforced.
I have been calling for reform within Council, especially in the area of our planning, compliance and enforcement divisions, for some time. This story just underlines for me how chronically under-resourced Council is in this area. I get more comments from ratepayers about this than many other issues.
I am bringing this issue to a wider audience because even as a Councillor I have been unable to get timely answers to my questions. Let's hope this does some good.
Hawkesbury's Local Housing Strategy and the pressure for development
On Tuesday, Hawkesbury City Council adopted our long-awaited Local Housing Strategy.
This document sets out how we will meet our housing targets over a timeframe of several decades.
Although this has implications for our whole city, the Liberal Councillors felt it was important to address a gap in the document.
The south eastern part of our City – the suburbs of Vineyard, Oakville and Maraylya, sit adjacent to some very aggressive urban growth. The ‘North Western Growth Sector’ is breathing down our neck across the county line in the Hills District, and has spilled into our own patch as the release areas named ‘Vineyard Stage 1 and Stage 2’
This pressure is tearing our community apart. Some are in favour of development, many against.
The one thing we can’t do is… nothing. I was disappointed that the Housing Strategy document said little about either the necessity, desirability, inevitability or show-stopping constraints of future development, other than remarking that the not-yet-finally-gazetted Outer Sydney Orbital corridor will continue to hang over us until that matter is definitely resolved.
I have strong opinions about this, but they matter less than seeking to understand what the majority view in those suburbs truly is. Some individuals or groups might claim to represent a clear majority, but I don’t think they do. I have a responsibility to represent all those views, and I take that seriously.
So, we moved a form of words that sought to survey and consult with the residents of Oakville and Maraylya to ask them what they wanted. Nothing more. Certainly not a decision to develop or not.
Your Liberal Councillors voted for that consultation. All the others, including Labor and the Greens, voted against it.
This video only contains my remarks, but I encourage you to listen to the whole meeting podcast (item 247, 8th December meeting) when it comes out to hear from my Liberal colleagues and the others.
The Vineyard Development area
Recently I completed a trio of short videos that go together in covering issues relating to housing development.
My desire is to touch on larger issues affecting our city and its future growth, but I use the example of the proposed development of the Vineyard area to illustrate them.
They cover:
- The extent of the Vineyard development in the context of the North West Growth Sector
- The role of both developers, the State Government, and Councils have in funding and delivering infrastructure
- The role of IPART, the Government's independent pricing regulator, in adjudicating whether Council's infrastructure plans are economical.
Here they are together.
Part 1: Development and Congestion in Hawkesbury City
Part 2: Who should pay for Infrastructure when housing development comes?
Part 3: Don't let population pressure tear our community apart.
Is Sydney Full?
"Significantly for the Coalition government, 61.7 per cent of Liberal supporters believe Sydney is full, 28 per cent are in favour of more development and 10.4 per cent are undecided."
To those who may remonstrate with me, my question is this: So when are we "done" with development? At what threshold, even in theory, would we say "this represents overdevelopment" in Sydney, when other cities in NSW are crying out for growth and investment? When, as the article bluntly poses the question, is Sydney "Full"? As a teacher, I've looked at this with my students, and I focused a unit of study on population around Dick Smith's excellent documentary The Population Puzzle. It's required viewing for anyone genuinely concerned about this issue.
As a local government representative, it concerns me that our ability to even contribute to that debate on your behalf is slowly being eroded by an increasing centralisation of planning controls, gravitating towards the Planning minister and panels of unelected bureaucrats. Many decisions that Councils used to make are being taken out of our hands. The reduction in local democracy is alarming.
Yet, my Liberal colleagues counter, this is because the decisions that many Councils make, including our own, are grossly inconsistent with the established planning guidelines. The substantial time and money invested by people seeking permission to do, legally, what they ought to be able to do with their land is subjected to the caprice and thought-bubbles of quixotic Councillors. Some of the decisions taken by our Council in the last year baffle me. Regretfully, the rank situation in Councils like Auburn, where developer Sam Mehajer brought the whole process of local government into disrepute, has caused all Councils, including our own, to be tarred with the same brush, and to be subjected to the same extreme corrective measures.
Again, both views represent facets of a larger truth.