Spare the trees

WHEN did the almighty automobile achieve so much importance ahead of maintaining a healthy environment in the pristine Yarra Valley?
The latest Yarra Ranges Council engineering design for the McKenzie Reserve upgrade shows the plans for a crowded 35-bay car park wedged onto the western edge of an additional 40m x 40m lawn bowling green for the Yarra Glen Bowling Club Inc.
This crowded car park duplicates the very often empty spaces that sit ready and waiting a few steps away beside the Garry Cooper Pavilion and the Yarra Glen tennis courts. This new car park will overlay an existing pedestrian access path linking Jules Court to McKenzie Reserve.
The “strong performing (but currently for sale) shopping centre” across Bell Street has 200 car parking spaces –but have they ever all been filled at the same time? The roof above the supermarket alone accommodates 60 spaces, and there is just a hairdresser up there duplicating the original hairdresser across the street.
In eight years plus of walking along the Jules Court access path daily, I have rarely seen more than seven to 10 vehicles parked outside the lawn bowls club. How does Yarra Ranges Council planning department come up with an entitlement of 78 car spaces (reduced down to 35)? If council’s figures are correct, there will be lots of work for a panel beater when 78 lawn bowlers try to fit into 35 tight spaces next summer.
Yarra Glen as a community is notorious for concocting sporting expansion needs based on totally unsubstantiated membership and participation growth forecasts. When you physically live every day beside two facilities – the tennis club and the lawn bowling club – you have to be blind if you cannot see how much or how little each existing facility usually gets used for sport. The attendance and participation numbers simply do not add up.
Membership growth, tourist dollars and “night time competition needs” were put forward when Yarra Glen Tennis Club made its application several years ago to install overhead lights on Courts 1, 2, 3 and 4. There is, to this day, no regular night time tennis competition. The Monday night social tennis is cancelled as often as it is announced. There are no adult mixed-doubles or men’s competition and no sign of any serious teenage competitors.
Why must McKenzie Reserve lose 14 parkland trees in favour of carbon-producing automobiles that already have more than enough Yarra Glen parking spaces?
Noel Buchanan
Yarra Glen