King George Oaks - ‘Council was going to move the trees’

Mr Richardson said the community – including King George V Ave residents – will pay a hefty price for council’s decision in 2013 to abandon long-held plans to make the road a second access point to Calala.

The developer behind the contentious 500-lot Peel River Estate development, which was approved this week, said council devised plans in 2004 to plant cuttings taken from the original trees away from the road and bury the overhead powerlines.

He said council asked for the tree plan to be included in his Peel River Estate application, but in the face of a “ridiculous, misinformed petition” to save the trees attracting 17,000 signatures, reversed its decision.

“It was never the developer who was going to move the trees, it was the council, and had we known what was going to go on subsequently and the delays we would have said ‘no way’,” Mr Richardson told The Leader yesterday.

“Council would have planted the new row of trees, buried the powerlines – which are destroying the trees anyway – we would have widened Paradise Bridge and then in 10 or 20 years’ time all the cuttings would have grown.

“It would have been a magnificent RTA-approved two-lane road servicing the new homes in Calala via Campbell Rd – a road that has been planned since the 1930s.”

The dormant issue of King George V Ave’s historic English oaks was thrust back onto the agenda this week when Councillor James Treloar called for a report outlining the land council would need to acquire to build a second road.

He said there was “obviously no alternative on how we can provide a second access to Calala”, with two recent studies showing crippling bottlenecks would afflict Goonoo Goonoo and Scott roads from about 2040 onwards.

Mr Richardson said it was inevitable a second road linking the CBD to Calala and Nemingha would need to be built and that the residents’ insistence on listing the trees would lumber them with a “dog’s breakfast” of a  solution.

“Now they’re going to have to put another road up to 50m away to protect those trees, so they’re going to have to resume a lot of land from those owners in King George V Ave,” he said.

“The whole thing has backfired on everybody. They should never, ever have supported the listing of those trees on the heritage register.

“It is a stupid thing that has happened and it is reflective of local politics because these politicians were scared of the 17,000 people who signed the petition saying ‘do you want to save the trees or not?’.

“The trees were never not being saved. They were always being saved. One row of trees would have been moved, it would have been done, the trees would grow up, no one would notice and they’d have a proper road.”