Where’s the grand plan?

THE 2016 Geelong Commission of Inquiry made an express recommendation that “urgent priority be given to the development of a 20 to 30-year outcome-focused vision and strategy for the Council and the City developed in consultation with key business, community and other stakeholders”.

Yes, the vision work has been completed, and I was part of the key stakeholder group working with chief administrator Dr Kathy Alexander and then- City of Greater Geelong CEO Kelvin Spiller to help deliver it.

But the strategy (and the plan to inform that strategy) – let’s call it “Plan Geelong” – has not been completed. In other words, there is no whole of city plan. Unfortunately, the administrators were moved on before that body of work could be completed.

As a professional department planner, how can you run this process to effectively lock up the Bellarine when there is no Plan Geelong to inform it? The Bellarine is not some isolated distinctive landscape, rather it is a critical and dynamic part of the City of Greeter Geelong, physically and strategically (including urbanisation, jobs, supporting infrastructure, tourism and people, as well as its distinctive landscape characteristics).

Governments of all persuasions continue to talk to the critical need for decentralisation from Melbourne and Sydney, and that the COGG is a critical part of that objective. Stated aspirational long-term population numbers for the region have been repeatedly cited at circa 750,000 by multiple stakeholders. My personal view is that we should be aiming for 1 million.

Whatever the number, there must be a plan to accommodate this level of needed urbanisation, particularly as it’s stated government policy (state and federal). How else can we possibly justify regional infrastructure spends such as that proposed for “fast rail” between Geelong and Melbourne?

I prepared a whole of city plan (tomroe.com. au/geelong-1-million) for the 2017 COGG council election, where I ran in the Bellarine Ward, i.e. the area in question – I may not have been successful,  but I did get more than 6 per cent of the primary vote and moved to about 10 per cent on second round preference flows.

The department may not like my whole of city plan, fine (and I’m not saying it’s perfect), but where is theirs?

The key point here, and my learning experience when preparing my plan to accommodate a million people (or 750,000, or 500,000), is you can’t just grow the city west and north – it must also pivot east. But until you do the work, you can’t appreciate this reality. I simply ask the question: where do the people go? Put your view on a plan and place it in the public domain. I’ve done my part (and had the anti-growth KKK outside my front gate), now where is the state’s plan?

Surely, this whole of city/region work needs to be done first before we launch into creating legislated “distinctive areas”.

Tom Roe is an Executive Director at Gersh Investment Partners.