Thebarton Oval lease

I was part of a huge crowd of passionate locals that turned out at Thebarton Community centre tonight for a 2 hour community meeting.

I thank Mayor Coxon for answering the many great questions from the locals. It was very clear that the community present have deep concerns about the proposed lease to the Crows for 42+42 years.

Mayor Coxon made it clear this first stage of the process is to gauge community support to lease the land out and for the value that will be leased for and that the detail will then be worked out if there is support.

So now it is very important for residents and rate payers to lodge all of their concerns about the proposed lease now if you don’t want it to proceed to the next stage.

My personal view:

Our community open space is very valuable, especially being so close to the city, and with so much infill development happening. Council completed a master plan in 2018 for this area which had an emphasis on open space for the community to enjoy with little restrictions. It seems not much has be done in the past 4 years on delivering this plan, which in some ways is understandable considering the uncertainty about the South Road expansion.

Your current Councillors voted to support this lease for community consultation with very generous rate rebates (no rates for 20 years) and rent rebates (80% off for 10 years). They have not explained the process well or the community benefits of the lease.

The lease goes for 42+42 years, our land is valuable to our community and we don’t need to hand it over to a private corporation to manage.

This land isn’t in Keswick ward, so why does it matter? The role of Councillor is to work together for our whole city to ensure its best use into the future. This also has the potential to put pressure on future rate increases as Council also plans to spend $9m on undefined infrastructure (in addition to the generous rebates)