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| 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;
|
 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. 2  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. 4  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. |