Chamber supports community land sale

Letting go of some community land could resolve the Peninsula's infrastructure backlog, according to president of the Peninsula Chamber of Commerce, Mr Matthew Wales.

'The Central Coast Council has masses of community land locked up in reserves," Mr Wales said.

According to Mr Wales, the current amount of land held in the former Gosford local government area makes it impossible for the council to maintain every piece of reserve.

"The current state of our COSS land is evidence of this, it is overgrown and to clean it up and maintain it would require a major injection of funding," he said.

'Those little bits of land stuck in between existing homes have never been developed into proper reserves or parks and the only thing council has ever done is mow them and then only when someone complains," he said.

Mr Wales said he believed the community expectation those blocks would stay vacant for ever may be unrealistic.

"If you want to be pragmatic wouldn't it be better to sell some of them to reinvest in better parks and reserves.

"The difficulty is finding the balance in retaining land that has value to the community and having so much land that the council cannot possibly maintain it all.

"We all complain that the Peninsula's streets have no kerb or footpaths and poor drainage so an objective sale of some council land would enable reinvestment in that infrastructure backlog," he said.

According to Mr Wales, capped rates and the lack of funding from State or Federal Government mean the Central Coast Council may have to look for alternative revenue sources and freeing up land is one possibility.

However, he said the council needed to be transparent when reclassifying any community land.

In particular, he said it would be essential to make public the report produced by the independent facilitator/consultant overseeing the reclassification of an initial 10 parcels of community land.

"You open yourself up to criticism if you don't release reports," he said.

"There are only two reasons to keep reports private: one is it includes information that is commercial-in-confidence and the other is it includes something you don't want the public to know about."

Interview, 3 Aug 2016

Matthew Wales, Peninsula Chamber of Commerce

Reporter: Jackie Pearson