campaign_landside - Beaumaris Conservation Society

Campaign 2013A: Rectifying major anomalies in
Ricketts Point Landside Reserve

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a photograph to enlarge it, or on a blue hyperlink below.

1.	The repeated misuse of the Ricketts Point Landside Reserve, and coastal Crown land adjoining it, by vehicles entering it, and for storing builders’ materials on it, should be prevented by Bayside City Council installing a suitable vehicle barrier between it and the access road from Point Avenue to houses near it.
2.	Bayside Council should amend its Ricketts Point and Ricketts Point Landside Reserve Management Plan to include a PROGRAM for achieving a gazettal to revoke excessive and obsolete road reserves, and create a new road reserve using much less area, to make the Landside Reserve a single entity, with a single zoning and purpose, to replace the ad hoc fragmented road reserves and car tracks now there.
3.	Unfortunately, in April 2014, Bayside City Council granted a permit to remove 11 trees from the Ricketts Point Landside Reserve and for it to be used as a worksite to remove debris from a landowner’s landslip. See a legal opinion on unauthorized structures, etc. on road reserves.

Ricketts
Point Landside Reserve and nearby land below was
used to store builders’ materials

Ricketts Point
Landside Reserve from 402 Beach Road,
Beaumaris, April 2013. See December
2013 view.

See
BCS Inc. April
2013 letter to Bayside Council urging
an end to this mess, and a barrier to stop
such acts. Council’s reply
left much to be desired. BCS Inc. is still
pursuing this. See detail
below.

Items
on Landside Reserve barrier opposite building
site at 401-2 Beach Road, Beaumaris,
March 2014

Bayside
City Council’s letter
of 2014-03-12 had a plan – whose
outcome appears below – for its yellow mesh
barrier that demarcated the access road from
the Landside Reserve – dumped on
by builders’ items above –
to be replaced with a line of bollards from
405 Beach Rd, Beaumaris, to the north side
of Point Ave. The line of bollards
deviates into the Landside Reserve to allow
parking where the car appears below. Clicking
on photos will enlarge them.

PROGRAM
below is needed to;

revoke as
much as practicable of the gazetted,
20-metre-wide old Beach Road reservation
abutting lots from Haydens Road to Reserve
Road;
add that
land to a
Ricketts Point Landside Reserve with a
surveyed rectilinear boundary; and
gazette a
road reservation no wider than 11 metres
abutting 394-402 Beach Road, with a vehicle
barrier between it and a contiguous Landside
Reserve free of ad hoc vehicle
routes.

The
carriageway within the new, narrower road
reservation should be as narrow as practicable
and barriered so that its verges stay free of
vehicles, and harmonize, as much as practicable,
with the landscape of the Landside Reserve and
the abutting lots 399-401 Beach Road, which are
covered by the Bayside Planning Scheme’s Coral

Avenue and Point Avenue Special Landscape

Overlay.

Red lines on this Council plan
show road reserve and Landside Reserve
boundaries near Point Avenue.

Google

map shows how much ad hoc
vehicle routes have encroached on the coastal

Crown land reserve.

Click here
to view plan of the entire Ricketts Point
Landside Reserve boundary, all of which abuts
road reservations.

Click here
to view the diagram of the boundary
recommended for gazettal as the Ricketts Point
Landside Reserve.

PROGRAM
needed as part of the Management Plan by
amending it, or as a separate Plan:
The PROGRAM should be included in Bayside City
Council’s Ricketts

Point & Ricketts Point Landside
Management Plan by a further
amendment of it, or by a separate Management
Plan for the Landside Reserve, following its
2014 upgrading to the status
of a Public

Conservation and Resource Zone in the
Bayside Planning Scheme.

Absurdity
of Dead-end Road Reserve being
as wide as Beach Road: Note that the
reserve for the unnamed 80-metre long dead-end
vehicle access road to the nominally Beach
Road addresses of 401 and 402 Beach Road,
Beaumaris, is – absurdly – the same 20-metre
width as the road reserve for Beach Road,
which is a four-lane high volume Arterial
Road. The present minimum carriageway
width on that dead-end vehicle access road
is 3.6 metres, which is the same width as
the present Point Avenue pavement, so a wide
carriageway is not needed.

That unnamed vehicle access road should be
gazetted as an extension of Point Avenue to
secure vehicle access to all the present Beach
Road addresses from north of 405 Beach Road to
Point Avenue, with a road reserve width not
more than the 7 metres needed.

The old, 20-metre wide reservation from
Haydens Road to Reserve Road should be largely
discontinued, with the land no longer so
reserved all being included within the
boundary of the Ricketts Point Landside
Reserve. The part of that old reservation
outside the suggested Reserve boundary should
be gazetted to be the only vehicle access road
for the nominally Beach Road lots from 394

to 402 Beach Road inclusive, and both
the present direct connections for accessing
Beach Road, which transect the Landside
Reserve should be discontinued. Within the new
boundaries of that road reservation, the
carriageway should be of a width consistent
with that of the carriageways in Point Avenue
and Coral Avenue, and be sited so that the
landscape of its verges harmonizes to the
greatest extent practicable with the adjacent
Landside Reserve, with a continuous vehicle
barrier needed between all of the carriageway
and the verge separating it from the Landside
Reserve to prevent public vehicle use there.

That vehicle barrier should end the ad hoc
vehicle access from Beach Road, allowing those
presently-trafficked routes to be planted as
part of the Landside Reserve. Some mature
trees might need to be removed, but planting
of the greater area of the present ad
hoc vehicle roadways and the two
vehicle access routes
to Beach Road, to supersede that use, will
more than offset that loss. Pedestrian
walkways to Beach Road can be delineated. BCS

Inc. referred to this general problem in its two January
2009 submissions to a VEAC Investigation

of Metropolitan Crown Land.

North of the present 405 Beach Road:
The current version of Bayside City Council’s
Ricketts

Point and Ricketts Point Landside Reserve
Management Plan shows in its Page

10 in Figure 1 some of the coastal

Crown land on the east side of the
Landside Reserve between 394 and 402 Beach
Road as being outside the Reserve, and some
being inside it. Those departures from a
rectilinear eastern boundary line appear to
have little basis in law or actual use. A
rationalization in the access road to
allotments, combined with a maximization and
consolidation of redundant areas of road
reservation to be added to a wholly contiguous
Landside Reserve should apply to the area
between 394 and 402 Beach Rd inclusive.

Vehicle access to each nominally Beach Road
allotment should be secured, by gazetting a
new access road as described above. Such a
gazettal would result in the Landside Reserve
becoming a single contiguous parcel of land,
which should be separated from those access
roads by a vehicle barrier. That enhancement
of the Reserve would be consistent with, and
would helpfully re-inforce, the Significant

Landscape Overlay (SLO1) on lots

fronting Coral and Point Avenues.

From the north of
405 Beach Road to Reserve Road: The

legal fiction of persisting with an unusable
road reserve along the length of the steep
sandy slope on the west boundary of the
private allotments from the northern boundary
of 405 Beach Road to Reserve Road, all of
which have Lang Street access – and would
therefore be expected to all have Lang Street
addresses, as a few already do – should be
ended.

Those lots should no longer have any direct
access to the Landside Reserve usable by
vehicles, and that could sensibly be
made obvious by their boundaries with it being
required to be fully fenced without openings
usable by vehicles, even bicycles, and their
Beach Road address designations being
discontinued. The Fences

Amendment Act 2014 appears to
facilitate Councils’ fencing of private land
bordering reserves.

That fiction is depicted by a black line
parallel to the line of boundaries to Beach
Road seen at the foot of the relevant

Bayside Planning Scheme map, although
that apparent road reserve appears there in a
Public Conservation and Resource Zone. The
fiction should be ended by gazetting a
revocation of that old road reserve, with the
land then added to Ricketts Point Landside
Reserve.

Fencing between freehold lots and the
Landside Reserve: The boundary between
all freehold lots and the Landside Reserve
where there is no need for an intervening road
reservation should be marked as such and
fenced, to properly delineate and separate
private land from the coastal

Crown land in the Landside Reserve.

Anomalies needing resolution: Various
anomalies are shown in captioned

photographs below.

Bayside City
Council’s draft Ricketts Point and Ricketts
Point Landside Management Plan

Letter

from Beaumaris Conservation Society Inc.
of March 2013 comments on Bayside City
Council’s draft Ricketts

Point and Ricketts Point Landside Management
Plan of February 2013.

The strip
of public

land between the road reserve for the
modern alignment of Beach Road and the line of
private lots fronting it is all coastal

Crown land, but it is not clear whether it
includes all of the Ricketts Point Landside
Reserve. It has a Public Conservation and
Resource Zoning (PCRZ)
as a result of Bayside City Council’s Amendment

C110, which sought its upgrading to that.

Illegal tree
clearing across Landside Reserve was publicized
in 2013 by Bayside City Council’s reward notice
above, and was reported
in 2011, where it gave access to abutting
private land.

Bayside
City Council proposed to intrude into the
Landside Reserve in July 2005 to construct 16 car parking
bays opposite the Ricketts Point Tea
House. Its proposal failed in October 2005 when
the Environment Minister refused to give his
written consent, which is a pre-condition for
any use or development of coastal Crown land
under Section

37 of Victoria’s Coastal Management
Act 1995.

Anomalies
encroaching on Ricketts Point Landside Reserve
and nearby coastal Crown land

Entrance 1 from Beach
Road to 394-398 Beach Road:
This unnecessary, duplicated vehicle access
should be closed
off and replanted, with access coming from
Coral Avenue only.

Entrance

2 from Beach Road to 400 Beach Road:

This duplicated,
superfluous vehicle access should be closed
off and replanted, with access coming from
Coral Avenue only.

Coastal

Crown land does not exist for the free
parking of private caravans. The Drooping
She-oke outside 398 Beach Road
should not be chained to such a caravan.

Concrete driveway encroachment well over
boundary of
400/1
Beach Road onto coastal

Crown land should be removed.

Concrete driveway encroachment
well over boundary of
400/2
Beach Road onto coastal

Crown land should be removed.

Planting should replace the mowing of this
swathe on the coastal

Crown land from
Beach Road to unused rear gates of 411 Beach
Road, accessed from Lang Street.

Attempts

to relocate 3 large
telecommunications cabinets, which
could have been far
better placed on Melbourne

Water’s site nearby in Reserve Road,
should be made.

Friends

of Ricketts Point Landside – whose
Convenor, Mrs Susan Raverty, can be emailed
here – is authorized by Bayside City
Council to conduct weeding and restoration work
on the
Landside Reserve, but its work is seriously set
back by the substantial damage detailed above,
and would be even more set back by the
interference with the site – by using it to
conduct works on 406A Beach Rd, rather than from
that freehold lot – that granting of the above

permit would entail.

Abutting
landowner’s 2014 application for a Planning
Permit to remove 11 trees from the Ricketts
Point Landside Reserve, and to use it as a
worksite to conduct repair works to structures
on private land damaged by a landslip

Click

on the photographs below to enlarge
them. The application below has been
prompted by a land subsidence at the
steep boundary between the above
freehold lot and the Ricketts Point
Landside Reserve. The remedy sought
could entail removal of vegetation
on the Reserve to provide access for
remedial works.

A pattern is appearing for this
Reserve where it is expected to be
compromised rather than some of the
abutting overdeveloped freehold lots
being required to be modified to
provide access for remedial works,
or even reduced in area so that they
are entirely self-contained and no
longer impinge on the abutting
Reserve.

Heavy tracked machinery that Bayside City Council let operate on metal mats placed across the Landside Reserve, on 21 July 2015	Crushed rock used as a base for the heavy tracked machinery despite concern over inevitable soil contamination by the rock
A landslip in September 2011 from 406A Beach Road, Beaumaris, onto the public land abutting it, left this massive debris on that public land, which is coastal Crown land managed as the Ricketts Point Landside Reserve.	Heavy debris above, in November 2013, is still left abandoned on the Ricketts Point Landside Reserve, over 2 years after the September 2011 landslip from a freehold property above it.
Notice of application for a Planning Permit to construct temporary access, retaining walls, and removal of vegetation on land abutting 406A Beach Rd, Beaumaris. Click on the notice to enlarge it. Click here for BCS Inc’s letter objecting to the above permit. Click here for a high resolution plan of works on the Landside Reserve for which a permit is sought. The plan also has a line showing the top of the unstable sandy bank in the abutting lot on the south. That line is well inland of the seaward boundary of that lot.	Close up view of the steep, unstable sandy slope along the boundary between the Ricketts Point Landside Reserve and higher freehold land abutting it – November 2013
Click here for satellite view of the part of Ricketts Point Landside Reserve the above application applies to. Note the abutting private open space to the north from which access for works could be negotiated. Click here for comments on works proposed to take place on this coastal Crown land to benefit an abutting private landowner.	Click here for a list of the above works. Click here for Section 37 of Victoria’s Coastal Management Act 1995, which states that a person must not use or develop coastal Crown land unless the written consent of the Minister has first been obtained. Click here for Item 4.3 on minutes of the Bayside City Council meeting that granted the permit.

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