Great Lakes Council has placed its draft Recreation Boating Infrastructure Strategy on public exhibition inviting comments and submissions which must be received by Council by 25th May. This is an important document as the plan will determine expenditure priorities for the future. The North Arm Cove Residents Association is currently preparing a response.
The full document may be downloaded from: http://www.greatlakes.nsw.gov.au/Your_Council/On_Exhibition/Recreation_Boating_Strategy
Section 2.0 of the document begins:
Great Lakes Council has provided a wide
range of facilities for recreational boating,
including boat ramps, jetties, pontoons
and fishing platforms. Ancillary structures
such as fish cleaning tables, trailer
parking, lighting and wash down facilities
have also been provided in some
locations.
For North Arm Cove Council has, as yet, provided no recreational boating facilities at all. That is:
-
No boat ramps
-
No jetties
-
No pontoons
-
No fishing platforms and
-
No ancillary structures
The report does make some brief references to the Cove. For example, in Section 6.0, tacked on to the end of a paragraph is a sentence: “There is also a request for facilities at North Arm Cove”.
On page 18, in an important section headed “Establish New Facilities”, we read that
there is sufficient spare capacity in adjoining facilities to service North Arm Cove
To determine what is meant by adjoining facilities we need to refer back to a footnote to the table on page 12:
North Arm Cove* assumes access to Karuah Boat Ramp.
For readers of this page not from the Cove, the Karuah boat ramp is 12-14km away from the Cove residents including a 2km stretch on the 110kph Pacific Highway. Once launched there is a similar length boat journey back to the Cove. Apparently this is considered “adjoining” for the purposes of this report.
Table 9.1 summarises existing and future needs. Beside North Arm Cove there is a slightly more hopeful sounding comment:
This area is in much need of some form [of] aquatic access facilities.
But this is followed by:
Due to environmental constraints and land tenure access is to be limited to jetty moorings and informal access where possible.
Compared to every other waterfront community in the Great Lakes Council region, North Arm Cove does have a miniscule amount of publicly accessible waterfront land. Largely this relates to the the way the Cove area was developed back in the 1920s, but a significant amount of the remaining waterfront land was also subsequently sold by Council.
It is not clear what is meant here by “informal access”.
In this same table there is a cost estimate for North Arm Cove facilities of $250,000 with the priority level given as medium. Ten other projects are also given medium priority. Funding required for these “medium priority” projects totals more than 3 million dollars.
There are five projects in the table rated as high priority. These have a total funding requirement of $663,000.
Unless we can convince Council otherwise, the correctly identified “much need” for aquatic access facilities at North Arm Cove is unlikely to be addressed any time soon.
