Councillor Don Palmer Providing Local Leadership & Working for You

While the media and others play with words and make all sorts of assertions about the Unley Oval and the future of the Sturt Football Club the next phase of the Community Assets Review is to be decided tomorrow night at the next full meeting of Council.

This phase is to call tenders from prospective consultants for master planning of the Oval precinct.

This will take I would have thought 3 or 4 weeks. We would then have to review the tenders received, select a preferred tenderer and then action the start of the process in the following month or so. It would be good to see the selected consultant be able to commence work by January next year.

There is clearly a lot of interest out there in the community so the sooner we get this underway the sooner we can start seeing suggestions for Council and the community to consider. The sooner we all can have something to get our teeth into and debate.

Until master planning is done there is no plan. Without a plan there is nothing that will happen to the precinct other than by way of add hoc projects conceived on the run to address issues that come up without notice.

Master Planning is about determining how the precinct should be developed in the next 20 years to serve the needs of our future community, including the sports clubs that have relevance to the needs of the community in the future and the recreation needs of this same community. I look forward therefore to seeing something with vision, something with the flexibility, something that will inspire the current generation to provide for the next generation and beyond.

A facility for the Unley community……vs …………. allowing our facilities to run down because we don’t know how or why we will be using them down the track.

So please ignore all the innuendo in the media and let us get under way in doing some serious planning. Once this is done we will have something to talk about and the media and you can get involved.

And as far as the recent article about it being about Sturt and we should not call tenders until we know Sturt’s financial position is all lunacy. If we should know their financial situation we should explore the financial situation of all clubs at all three locations we intend to do master planning for.

It is like planning a trip from Adelaide to Melbourne but not commencing the journey until we know all the traffic lights are green, Guess what – we will never leave home.