By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
AN ACTION plan to manage southern Greater Dandenong’s vast tracts of green wedge land was close to being shot down by councillors on Monday.
Councillors were equally split on the action plan despite it being a logical extension of the green wedge management plan endorsed by councillors last year.
The plan passed only with the casting vote of Mayor Sean O’Reilly.
In opposition, Cr Peter Brown said the management plan for the 3741-hectare green wedge failed to recognise that current zoning was preserving “hundreds of acres of land, much of which doesn’t even have a tree”.
“There are a diverse number of owners entitled to the full value of the land,” Cr Brown said.
“It’s not our land to lock up for people to drive past and look at.”
Cr Matthew Kirwan said Cr Brown’s argument was based on shifting the urban growth boundary – an issue that no major political party had the “appetite” to visit.
He said residential development further south would be blighted by flood drainage issues and isolation from schools and public transport.
The plan comprised projects to preserve ecological values, landscape-dominated vistas and wildlife corridor linkages and to manage the flood-prone plains.
The plan also aimed to create “certainty” about appropriate land uses such as recreation, agriculture, “rural residential”, tourism and open space.
It reconfirms a bar on residential development within the Eastern Treatment Plant buffer zone in Bangholme, and rebuffed a bid by Keysborough land owners to carve up their properties for housing estates.
The zone also includes several historic homesteads associated with the early-settler Keys family such as Glen Alvie, Eversleigh and Holmwood farms.
The report states a band of Aboriginal-scarred trees from Keysborough-Lyndhurst may be possibly the state’s largest.
