EUROBODALLA ratepayers have every right to be outraged at the way they have been treated by council over sea-level rise planning.
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More than 6000 properties across the shire were declared at risk by council’s sea-level rise policy, forcing any that wanted to develop or sell to pay thousands of dollars for coastal engineering reports to determine the risk to their properties. However, the council’s own $55,000 Coastal Hazard Scoping Study of the Eurobodalla coastline, performed by Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation (SMEC) in 2009, showed this to be completely unnecessary.
Almost 99 per cent of properties in Maloneys Beach were swept up by council’s policy, but the SMEC study hazard zone showed only 1 per cent of properties were vulnerable to the benchmark sea-level rise of 0.9m.
Therefore about 98 per cent of properties in Maloneys Beach had their S149 Certificates annotated as identified of being at risk from sea-level rise when council staff knew it was not the case.
This was repeated across the shire to greater or lesser extents.
The SMEC study is now buried under several layers of council’s website along with its hazard mapping.
The administration’s submission on the study to council in 2010 said the mapping “can be immediately applied to identify hazard categories” in the application of council’s interim policy “for areas where long term recession rates have been calculated”. But council staff never incorporated that mapping into their policy. Why not? Instead they continued to demand that ratepayers fund expensive coastal engineering reports.
A quick reference to the SMEC hazard maps would have immediately identified any potential risk up to the year 2100.
Council staff could have done this themselves and only request an engineer’s report if the property was within, or adjacent to, the hazard lines, thus saving many ratepayers significant and unnecessary cost.
Fifteen other councils commissioned similar studies by SMEC and used them in this way. The Eurobodalla did not.
A further example of what separates the Eurobodalla Shire from the rest.
David Lambert
Long Beach