Toondah Harbour Redevelopment

Priority Development Area (PDAs) “are designed to fast-track significant state infrastructure and ensure delivery – viz 2018 Commonwealth Games. Draconian PDA legislation has no legitimate application to Toondah Harbour – which needs just a port upgrade.

A PDA removes environmental and consultation planning requirements that are standard for any normal development. It removes civil rights.

Secrecy surrounds everything about the Toondah Harbour development proposal. Council claims that it conducted consultation are disingenuous and fallacious.

No credible Environment Impact Statement and other relevant studies were carried out to prove a market for new apartments, parking demand, traffic, sewerage and waste water handling, etc.

The Cleveland CBD is already struggling economically and will be doomed by a competing commercial hub.

Community opposition – including testaments from numerous professional experts – has been ignored by RCC and government.

Seeney’s successor Minister Jackie Trad defends the Walker Corp mega development (a land grab) using the same jobs rhetoric as the RCC mayor, but the promise is meaningless”.

At a stakeholder meeting held in Cleveland, a representative from the Walker Corporation stated there would be no jobs for locals.

“Neither RCC nor government has informed people that a PDA also relieves a development from responsibility for associated infrastructure and maintenance outside PDA boundaries. Redlands ratepayers would pay, in perpetuity, for necessary infrastructure and to fix all future problems associated with roads, parking, pollution, sewerage, flooding, loss of fisheries, etc, related to the development.

The proposed 3600 units mean around 10,000 extra residents, plus their cars. Underground parking is not feasible because the site is flood-prone. No schools, hospitals or other social infrastructure are planned to service this major new urban location. (Minjerribah’s population is around 1900.)

In addition to the vehicles of 10,000 residents, the 400-berth marina would generate significant traffic and parking pressures.

The extra parking and traffic would compete with the parking and traffic needs of the port and transport interchange.

The most fundamental problem of moving 10,000 additional residents to and from the site to the Cleveland rail head is not addressed.

A ten-storey wall of buildings would flank Cassim Island. Man-made parklands would be created from spoil dredged from the marina – disturbed Acid Sulphate Soils and heavy metals.

The cost to fix the port is a fraction of the $1.39 billion, 30-year construction magnitude Walker Corp proposes. The disruption to the port location caused by 30 years of construction activity will inconvenience residents and travellers and hamper Minjerribah tourism.

This does’t even begin to count the environmental costs of a mega construction within a Ramsar site, expropriating a section of Moreton Bay Marine Park, destroying mangroves and seagrass beds, eliminating fish nurseries and koala habitat, threatening unique Bay corals …

Currently the Commonwealth government is assessing the project under the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. A decision has already been delayed five times. A decision is expected in September. If the Commonwealth handballs the environmental approvals to the State government, we are in trouble.

The community has exhausted its legal avenues, though there is huge continuing opposition. (Check out Redlands 2030 site.)”…

“There is such a lot of material condemning the project from different angles. Here, for instance, is John Mainwaring, architect and marina consultant, on the matter of mud:

It is because of the mud that I reasoned initially that the project was not feasible.

There is possibly 2million cubes of acid sulphate sediment (mud) that has to be dealt with. It is extremely expensive.. I mean extremely expensive. This is why you don’t see many of these types of projects. The boys (Meridian) at the big Airlie Beach marina took7 years to to get the permits to move the mud. This, and the GFC sent them broke.

The only way these very expensive projects can be done is, if the government does this civil infrastructure and spreads the cost out over a hundred years and Developers won’t do this. e.g. China in the south China Sea. I am surprised Lang Walker took this on because he is very prudent and a competent seaman and yachtsman. The only thing is, it must be being done by his underlings.

At any event they will be trying every trick in the book to deal with the mud. Incidentally, where does the mud go that is currently being dredged in the existing channel? I am pretty sure it is not disposed of by truck.. I bet it goes out to the NE channel and disappears into the ocean on an ebb tide! and the permit to do this probably goes back many decades.

However, the approvals to create ‘cells’ in other parts of the bay to stockpile and store the mud would not be likely and there would be a national uproar. Disposing the mud by truck to landfill (e.g. old Ipswich mine shafts) is far to expensive”.

Jackie Cooper