campaign_2013_beaumaris_reserve - Beaumaris Conservation Society

Campaign
2013B: Opposing surfacing or kerbing of Beaumaris
Reserve’s sandy entry route

Click on
the menu of Main
Pages here or on a blue hyperlink below.

here to see the program of gravelling and
paving that Bayside City Council has completed in
2014.

BCS Inc. opposed this
high, dry, sandy entry road being surfaced or
kerbed.

BCS Inc’s letter
of 25 November 2013 responded to the
most

recent changes in October 2013 that
Bayside City Council proposed to its Beaumaris
Reserve Master Plan. It welcomed Council’s abandoning

its earlier proposals to remove six
trees for car
parking spaces, and to bitumenize the sandy entry road above,
but it opposed the gravelling and kerbing since
completed.

BCS Inc. opposed Council’s most recent proposal
to gravel

and kerb that entry road, instead asking
that the existing dry, sandy surface – one of
the few areas left in inland Beaumaris where
people can still walk on the natural sandy
surface of Beaumaris – be left sandy, as it was,
and that its edges not be kerbed. Its edges
could be marked by a pine log barrier on the
south side, like the existing barrier on the
north side in the photo above. BCS Inc. accepts
a gravel surface for the actual parking area.

BCS Inc. had earlier challenged

Council claims of implausibly high traffic
use (based on no actual count on site)
and unsubstantiated high maintenance costs it is
using to support a change to the surface of this
pleasant sandy car park entry road. Council
should use, instead of the hard kerbs also planned,
more low treated pine barriers or square timber
posts, as already exist further west.

The 2013

Amendment to the 2008 Beaumaris Reserve
Master Plan that Bayside City Council
considered on 2013-10-29 has withdrawn – but
only after opposition by BCS Inc. and
residents – its plan to remove

6 trees for car parking, but the
amendment still has a general thrust of
regimenting and replacing some of the
genuinely Beaumaris informal ambience of the
Reserve.

The most recent plan, submitted for public
comment, due by 2 December 2013, appears here.

An
example was the poor statement in Attachment

3, “traffic island to be in concrete
to provide contrasting appearance”. Rather
than replacing gravel with Council’s imagined
delights of a “contrasting appearance”
of concrete and bitumen, BCS
Inc. prefers gravel around the traffic island,
with the traffic island being low indigenous
vegetation protected by timber posts.

Council also installed four conspicuous 30

m high lighting poles, over 50% higher
than the existing poles.

Return to
the CAMPAIGNS page.

Link to the Port
Phillip Conservation Council Inc. – BCS
Inc. has been a Member Organization of it since 1970