Tag: bureaucracy

Major urban redevelopment plans

I said yesterday nothing could prevent Australia from losing the first cricket Test to India, and that was borne out today. India won by 295 runs, a massive victory. So India take a 1-0 lead in the series, with four games to play. It’s very hard to see Australia coming back in any way, so comprehensive was the thrashing.

Today, the New South Wales government released plans for redevelopment of several zones around Sydney, including an area close to where I live. There’s already some major construction work going on very close to us, which I’ve mentioned before. Several blocks of single detached houses have been demolished and construction is underway on apartment blocks up to 15 or so storeys tall.

Here’s a render of the full development proposal. (© State of New South Wales, released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence.)

Crows Nest redevelopment

The white additions are buildings already approved and/or under construction (including the ones I mentioned above). The blue buildings are the newly proposed developments, including the semi-transparent tower in the foreground. Almost all of these sites currently are one or two storey buildings, so it’s a huge increase in the height of buildings in the area. The plan says this will add 5900 new homes (all apartments, I think) to the area. I guess that’s about 15,000 extra people living in the immediate area.

Oh, and some of our favourite places are slated for demolition and redevelopment under this plan. Our favourite pizza place. A slew of other restaurants we’ve frequented over the years. I don’t think there’s any chance this won’t go ahead. Government plans at this stage tend to be inevitable.

I guess we just have to live through it and see how it turns out.

New content today:

Killing grass

I live near a small park, where I take Scully to toilet and to play in the grass a bit, nearly every day. The local council posted notices several months ago that they were planning landscaping work in the park. A couple of weeks ago they fenced off part of the park to start work. The park is on a slope, and Scully likes to lie on the top of the small hill so she has a good view of the surrounding area. The place she likes to lie is just outside the fenced off area, so I assumed it was fine for us to be there.

Then about a week ago the grass started going brown. Subtly at first, but then very noticeably, over a few days. Yesterday it was very clear that the grass was dying. Which was very weird, because there was a pretty stark line between the dying grass outside the fenced off area, and the still green grass inside the fence.

Herbicided

I started wondering if the grass had been sprayed with herbicide, as I couldn’t think of any other reason why it would suddenly die like this. I found the contact details of the local council project manager on the information sign posted on the temporary fencing, and phoned her up. I said I was a local resident, and I noticed the grass was dying in the area next to the fenced off works area, and asked if herbicide had been applied. She confirmed that the area had been sprayed with a glyphosate-based herbicide.

I pointed out that the area sprayed was outside the fenced off works area, and that people and dogs walked across the area every day, and that no notice of any sort was given that herbicide would be used on the area, nor any sort of warning that people might want to stay off the grass.

Then I realised that about a week ago Scully had been sick for two days, vomiting, and avoiding food. That would have been around when they must have sprayed that grass. I’m no expert – I don’t know if glyphosate can cause that in dogs, but it’s a little worrying. So I’m a bit upset about this.

To add to the stupidity, the project manager told me that the slope had been sprayed to kill the grass in preparation for removal and relandscaping the slope with sandstone and concrete, but they’d since decided they weren’t going to do that, and it will now be left the way it was! So they actually killed all that grass for no reason! Ugh.

In other news, today was very warm. We recorded 29.3°C, the warmest day since 13 March. It’s definitely an early, hot spring. We’re supposed to get similar temperatures tomorrow. My wife and I took Scully for a long walk early, before the heat of the day. There were a lot of people out and about, walking around, enjoying the warm weather. We’re wondering if this is a harbinger of a very hot summer coming up.

New content today: