Hotel Indigo proposal falls over

THE proposed Hotel Indigo in Torquay appears to have fallen over for good, with the Greater Torquay Alliance (GT Alliance) celebrating the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal’s (VCAT) dismissal of an appeal by the developer.

Barnes Capital applied to build a five-storey, 128-room hotel at 2-4 Geelong Road, but the Surf Coast Shire council refused to grant a planning permit in May 2019.

The developer appealed to VCAT to have the refusal overturned, but the proposal suffered a major setback when 2-4 Geelong Road was listed for sale in October and then sold to a local buyer in November.

On Friday, GTA posted on its Facebook page that Barnes Capital did not respond to a deadline in December to advise if they could run their case and also did not attend a hearing scheduled for that day, so VCAT dismissed the appeal with no further action to be taken.

“So I would say that yes, on the face of it from what we can see, it’s over with, barring the developer getting some funding out of somewhere and coming along and buying the properties off the new owners,” GTA president Andrew Cherubin said on Monday this week, adding that Barnes Capital would have to go through the full planning application process again with the Surf Coast Shire if it wanted to revive the project.

Mr Cherubin said he was “really happy” Hotel Indigo had gone away but was less happy about how far the application had progressed.

“In some ways, I’m disappointed that it could happen; that we have a five-storey application that could even be considered in an area where the corner is limited to three storeys and the other three sides are limited to two storeys.

“The problem is we have guidelines in the planning scheme, not definite terms.

“We were gearing up for a strong fight – we were running a GoFundMe and things like that to get barristers, and we felt we had a pretty good case.

“In a way, it would have been nice to have a conclusion (at VCAT) that hopefully we would have won, and it would have been laid to rest; ‘these are the limits’.

“So now we’re turning to the Distinctive Area and Landscape process, which hopefully will set the limits.”