Not community consultation, and not sustainable

Regarding "Council to replace removed dune trees" (PN 559 12 Dec 2022), as a founding member of a community Landcare group that your article says was supposedly subject to "extensive community consultation" by Central Coast Council, your readers should know this:

Local residents groups, with one exception, only found out about this "proposal" two weeks before we met with Council's engineer when he invited us to be involved in replanting/repairing the "altered dune".

This is the only remnant dune remaining on Umina Beach.

In most coastal communities, the dunes that remain are granted certain protections.

Council's actions on restoring dunes at Wamberal from "attack" by Mother Nature are well known.

Here we have the Council itself attacking the dune from behind, while simultaneously spending our money trying to restore the other side of the dune further north on Ocean Beach.

Does Central Coast Council, recently back in the black after years of financial turmoil, now think they can spend our money on continually removing trees (and/or facilitating others to remove them) to replace them with concrete and bitumen?

This is part of the reason the Peninsula, despite being surrounded by water and criss-crossed by creeks and lagoons, is six degrees warmer than other parts of the City.

With less money spent, we could have permeable surfaces instead of concrete paths, guttering and bitumen carparks.

Several Australian companies make or supply surfaces that are as solid as concrete and permeable (one is based in Toronto to our near north).

Instead, we are going to get water channelled from council's hard works to an adjoining block near the caravan park entrance which will become an absorption pit with concrete pipelines.

All of this will achieve basically what we have now, with a big puddle and less vegetation and no trees.

Council's review reportedly "... identified that it was not possible to meet both the competing objectives of providing improved parking and safe accessibility while not impacting the rear portion of the dune."

This is a farce.

This is not how you do community consultation.

This is not environmentally sustainable.

This is a Council totally disconnected from residents and ratepayers.

I would be interested in knowing how much money this portion of the project is costing?

SOURCE:

Email, 5 Jan 2023

Bryan Ellis, Umina