We were proved right: after all our campaigning, the height was reduced by just 2 floors and the number of flats was reduced by only 20 with a laughable 15% affordable housing.
So here comes 2nd June. As part of Council’s Consultation process we are all invited to go and see the Developers’ presentation at Guildhall. No doubt they will come up with a sleek presentation with the usual hot air. We will try to put our case as well. Councillors will try to make sense of the arguments.
The problem is that St George is a well-resourced commercial operation with full time staff, supported by a phalanx of professional advisers. At every stage of this process, the documentation became more and more extensive. The documents associated with this application on the Council’s website now consist of some 4,300 pages.
Who in this process, apart from St George, has the time and expertise to read and review this weight of documentation?
How many pages of this Amazonian rain forest of paper have the members of the Development Control Committee really waded through and digested, if they are honest with us?
As a group of local residents, with nothing more than our own spare time and money to hand, we freely admit that we have struggled to master this bureaucratic lunacy.
We have tried very hard to seek out the checks and balances in this process, so the developers are held to account for their many and varied contraventions of Council policy that will blight the area where we live. We will do our best again.
Tomorrow we will be asking the developers a lot of uncomfortable questions. We will also ask the Councillors on the Committee to take notice of the deeply-held views of their constituents, reject this over-commercialised and poorly-designed eyesore and to strike out on a new path – to promote development that is of human scale and in harmony with the built environment of Kingston town.
Come and be part of this process.
So here comes 2nd June. As part of Council’s Consultation process we are all invited to go and see the Developers’ presentation at Guildhall. No doubt they will come up with a sleek presentation with the usual hot air. We will try to put our case as well. Councillors will try to make sense of the arguments.
The problem is that St George is a well-resourced commercial operation with full time staff, supported by a phalanx of professional advisers. At every stage of this process, the documentation became more and more extensive. The documents associated with this application on the Council’s website now consist of some 4,300 pages.
Who in this process, apart from St George, has the time and expertise to read and review this weight of documentation?
How many pages of this Amazonian rain forest of paper have the members of the Development Control Committee really waded through and digested, if they are honest with us?
As a group of local residents, with nothing more than our own spare time and money to hand, we freely admit that we have struggled to master this bureaucratic lunacy.
We have tried very hard to seek out the checks and balances in this process, so the developers are held to account for their many and varied contraventions of Council policy that will blight the area where we live. We will do our best again.
Tomorrow we will be asking the developers a lot of uncomfortable questions. We will also ask the Councillors on the Committee to take notice of the deeply-held views of their constituents, reject this over-commercialised and poorly-designed eyesore and to strike out on a new path – to promote development that is of human scale and in harmony with the built environment of Kingston town.
Come and be part of this process.
We started our campaign because what is proposed was unacceptable from day one. We feared that the plans may not be refused by the development control committee when it came to a vote, unless a vigorous opposition made its voice heard. We knew this because we met the leader of the Council and the developers on numerous occasions and we felt our concerns were not being taken seriously. We knew there would be some tweaks here and there, of course, but high-rise developments were going to be built in Kingston...