12:00a.m. 22nd July 2008

| By Bill Hoffman

An internal legal paper prepared for Sunshine Coast Council is using the disastrous planning outcomes at Chancellor Park as hard lessons for the future.

The lack of a master plan for the estate, which is really an amalgam of seven separate developments, has left the council with infrastructure headaches.

These range from lack of open space playing areas for the suburb’s burgeoning youth population and poor road connectivity, to a failed lake system which will require a vast amount of money to restore.

So naive was the process that the open spaces of Palmview to the south of the suburb were not considered during planning because it was in Caloundra City.

With the state government now demanding the fast tracking of development approvals for that greenfield site, it is certain council will want the lack of road connectivity both within Chancellor Park and road network access to Palmview addressed in fine detail before the bulldozers move in.

But even though the document “Lessons to be Learned” about the history and legal issues associated with Chancellor Park now informs council’s whole development application team, regional director of strategy and planning Julie Edwards said there was still a learning curve on all development.

Ms Edwards said the state government’s original intent to put the regional hospital in the suburb would have led to chaos in terms of the road network.

The belated rectification of planning shortfalls started with the establishment of the Sippy Downs Town Centre which has relied on a Stringybark Road crossover and motorway access.

Retrofitted road networks pushed hard by then divisional councillor and now Kawana MP Steve Dickson will help untangle some of the mess but the solutions are expensive and left to the community to bear.

That cost is something of which council environment manager Doctor Steve Skull is acutely aware.

His team waded through through the contents of cardboard boxes containing the 100 separate planning files relating to Chancellor lakes to get a handle on how that mess was created.

One thing is certain. Council is now much more circumspect with the advice it receives from experts engaged by developers.

“Information is only as good as you accept it to be,’’ Ms Edwards said.

“Council can’t afford every type of expert but we now have in-house traffic and environment teams.

“It helps as we try to preserve independent thinking (about development applications).”

The history of the area that now is called home to several schools, a university and a resident population of 6,900 people showed that the old Maroochy Shire Council had originally wanted nothing to do with development on what was effectively drainage problem land.

Ms Edwards said the council said no to an application to develop the western half of what is now Chancellor Park. The developer appealed, there was an election and a change of council with the incoming administration deciding to settle the matter with an agreed set of conditions.

The council again changed at an election and an application to develop the eastern portion was refused outright.

The Planning Court appeal was lost by council leaving it with a subdivision which was in effect in two halves with no master plan to pull it together.

It is a sequence of events that the new regional council is determined won’t be repeated.

The “Lessons to be Learned” paper makes clear that development conditions need to be explicit and not just understood.

Dr Skull’s unenviable task to find a cost-effective way to restore water quality within the failed 10-lake system which forms the estate’s drainage train, is being watched with keen interest across Australia by an industry that has developed around artificial waterway management.

He said it would be an easy position to take to simply ban future artificial waterways.

“There are now smarter ways to work it,’’ he said. “You wouldn’t build a chain of ponds today. You would deal with drainage differently. The science around lake systems hardly existed at all when the lakes were designed.’’