ROSEBUD VIC 3939 

Dear Dr Kennedy, 

Application to Reconstruct Bathing Boxes at Mount Martha North Beach: P02/0546, P00/2498, P02/0561  

As we stated in November 2000, and as appears in our record of that statement on our Web site at www.ppcc.org.au/ykh_morn.htm and in our letter published in The Age in February 2001, shown at www.ppcc.org.au/abo_bawd.htm, Port Phillip Conservation Council Inc. objects to the replacement of "bathing boxes" damaged by storms, on the basis that such damage demonstrates the unsustainability of bathing boxes on a site such as the Mount Martha North beach. Changed designs are unproven, and just experimental.  

Our reasons for objecting to the recently approved structures appear at www.ppcc.org.au/bbd_morn.htm and these reasons apply also to our objection to the above applications. 

In addition to those reasons, there are two more reasons that we ask Council to take note of in regard to two of the above applications. 

P02/0561 (Site 133): The overall height of this proposed structure would be 6.35 metres, which is 0.85 metres higher than that proposed for the next highest of the three proposed (5.5 metres), and significantly higher than any of the four approved in Council’s most recent decision on this matter, where the overall height range of those approved was 5.2 – 5.7 metres. Council should resist this incremental creeping upward of claims, and that could be achieved by requiring that the option of a slatted floor at 2.1 metres be used instead, and that the overall height should be decreased so that it is no higher than the larger of the other two applications, i.e. 5.5 metres.  

That consistency with the recent precedents and the other current applications would set bounds that all other applicants have been satisfied with, that would meet the design standards, and that are closer to the pre-existing height impacts and the surviving intact row of boxes. 

P02/0546 (Site 125): As the linked photograph shows, growing just above the bottom of the cliff face immediately behind this site, and very close to it, is a vigorous attractively-flowering Coast Banksia tree (Banksia integrifolia). That tree is now well-entrenched, but it is still young. It will soon grow to become very large, tall and heavy. Allowing a structure to be built so close to it will produce a conflict between the great natural appeal that such a tree will give that section of coast, and the inevitable apprehensiveness that will grow about the possibility of its soon threatening the structure just below it, which would have arrived well after it did. 

Surely a gap in a line of some 150 closely spaced structures, for a good environmental reason, would be possible. 

Yours sincerely, 

Geoffrey Goode 
President,
Port Phillip Conservation Council Inc. 

cc. Minister for Environment and Conservation, Hon. Sheryll Garbutt MLA; Mr Victor Perton MLA, 
      Councillors of Mornington Peninsula Shire Council