Critical Times

A packed 5-hour meeting at Woodville Town Hall last night called on the government to go back to the drawing board on the Cheltenham Race Course re-zoning.

Experts in town planning, water management, open space and recreation joined with local residents to condemn the short-sighted government plans to replace precious open space with housing.

Every one of the 50 people who spoke at the meeting last night criticised aspects of the government plan. Around 200 people attended the meeting and nearly 800 people had previously made written submissions.

Greens MLC (and planning lawyer) Mark Parnell challenged Minister Holloway’s hand-picked Advisory Committee to throw out the re-zoning plans and instead embrace the community’s vision of quality open space coupled with urban water capture and storage.

“The current redevelopment plans for Cheltenham are simply not good enough. They don’t preserve sufficient useable open space and they don’t deliver stormwater solutions. Instead, it’s business as usual with yet another housing estate. The community is up in arms and rightly so.”

“The fifty hectare Cheltenham Racecourse should be part of a wider vision for Adelaide. Instead, we are carving up pieces of land bit by bit and losing forever the opportunity to make our city more sustainable”, said Mark Parnell.

Even those submissions that supported some housing on the site, urged the government to “do it properly”. With a railway line running past the site there is great scope for a proper “Transit-Oriented Development”, however the government has not even committed to a new train station to service the area.

“In the meantime, the only responsible solution is to keep Cheltenham as 100% open space, so we don’t waste this once in a lifetime opportunity”, concluded Mark Parnell.