Warrandyte Bridge Community Forum – an opportunity for interested residents and agencies to find out from VicRoads: where the upgrade project is up to; what has been made of community feedback to date; what aspects of the project are able to be influenced by further community feedback and; the process and timelines for the remainder of the project.
Read the VicRoads Report – Warrandyte Bridge Upgrade Community Feedback Report October 2016
Read the VicRoads Urban Design Advisory Panel Summary Communication 15 Dec 2017
Brief notes were taken on the night which attempt to capture the essence of the discussion, read them here.
BRIDGE OVER TROUBLED WATER – WCA’S POSITION
The Warrandyte Community Association has held many forums and public meetings in recent years in the general public interest, particularly relating to bushfire awareness. (For example: the post bushfire Forum in May 2009, Emergency Management meetings and Bushfire Scenario Events. The next one is on Thursday 27th Oct 2016 7.00pm at the Warrandyte Community Church – don’t miss it!)
While some express the opinion that WCA does not speak for the Warrandyte Community as a whole, WCA does represent our membership and pursues the mandate in our constitution and schedule, available on our website. We have a point of view, with which we believe a significant proportion of Warrandyte residents are in agreement, even if they are not members.
Public meetings enable residents to express and exchange a range of opinions which we try to capture but don’t necessarily endorse. We published all the opinions from our 2005 Traffic forum with VicRoads in the Warrandyte Diary, with an emphasis on gridlock and emergency evacuation. Following the terrible 2009 fires, a WCA forum, enabled residents to raise many issues, including an opinion for a third lane on the bridge, which WCA relayed to the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission. Some of those opinions were contentious, e.g. sirens, bunkers and bridge widening. WCA members have a range of opinions on the bridge. We have not adopted a formal position.
Residents have raised congestion on the bridge at every bushfire meeting since. VicRoads first presented a proposal to widen the bridge at a WCA Emergency Management forum in November 2015. WCA had no prior knowledge of what they were going to present. (However it was later revealed that Emergency Management Victoria had recommended to State Government in 2014 that WCA be part of the VicRoads feasibility study. That didn’t happen).
Following the VicRoads presentation at our November meeting, we encouraged VicRoads to attend the Warrandyte Festival. We also recommended to them the venue (but not the format) for their July meeting, which was subsequently criticized quite widely.
Many in the community clearly felt frustrated and uninformed about the results of those meetings which, although employing considerable resource from VicRoads, were not considered to be proper ‘community consultations’. The WCA then organized the Forum on the ‘the Bridge’ to allow structured discussion, accepting the strongly held divergent views on the project.
We ran the Bridge Forum as a WCA meeting to enable VicRoads to share their results in a format acceptable to us rather than to their design. We are not aware of any other group running public meetings on this issue, although many have expressed views on Facebook. We have tried to capture the essence of the Bridge Forum discussion in note below.
As we have been accused of both supporting the VicRoads proposition and opposing by different parties we obviously succeeded in providing a valuable forum for community debate!
It has been our practice in the past to solicit feedback from attendees about the organisation and content of our meetings. We distributed a feedback form which about 40% of the 130 or so attendees completed. The results are given below.
It is clear that VicRoads consider the period of ‘ consultation’ over and will presumably proceed along the lines in their report ‘Warrandyte Bridge Upgrade’ October 2016 which is available online here and which they distributed in hard copy at the meeting. There is however still opportunity to influence design and particularly the south side works – if further funding is available. Clearly the ring road link is now a priority to relieve congestion. The challenge is for Warrandyte to work constructively to achieve the best possible result under the circumstances. WCA will continue to provide opportunities for all views to be aired.