On Tuesday 20 April at 5.00 p.m. at SpringDale Neighbourhood Centre, DCSCA ran an information session about how Planning Panels work.
The session was for anyone who has submitted their views to the City of Greater Geelong (CoGG) about one or both of its proposed Amendments C103 and C194 to the Greater Geelong Planning Scheme. CoGG has referred each Amendment to an independent Planning Panel, which held its first public hearing on Wednesday April 14. (See 'Re-zoning Drysdale & Clifton Springs (2)' elsewhere on this blog.)
Anyone who has submitted their views about C103 and/or C194 has a right to present their views to the Planning Panel when it holds its public hearings on May 12-14. However, not everyone is used to presenting their views in public, especially in a formal setting such as a Planning Panel. DCSCA didn't want anyone to forego their right to address the Planning Panel just because they're unfamiliar with the process, so we wrote to each person who'd made a submission, inviting them to attend the information session if they felt that they needed advice or assistance concerning the Planning Panel.
Just five people attended, although one of them had made a submission on behalf of several other people. Each person said that they found the session useful and thanked DCSCA for contacting them and for running the session.
DCSCA hasn't run such a session before and we had no idea of whether anyone would attend - so five was a good number! We will run similar sessions in future to enable and encourage local people to have their say about how they want to live in our towns.
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