With the flick of a pen, the Victorian government has acceded to the City of Ballarat's proposal to open up the Ballarat Town Common and a large swathe of farming land to the city's north for new housing development, paving the way for some 15,000 extra residents.
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The new northern growth area, earmarked for development by council in October 2019, extends from the eastern side of Miners Rest through to parts of Mount Rowan at the edge of the Midland Highway, and includes - controversially - the Ballarat Commons.
Though welcomed by the City of Ballarat, the move to rezone the land urban growth zone has already raised questions around infrastructure capacity and, in particular, the stated inability of council to deliver critical infrastructure absent higher investment from the state government.
City of Ballarat mayor Daniel Moloney said recently established suburbs, including Winter Valley and Lucas, as well as the newer areas of Alfredton, already bore the unmistakable scars of the city's drive for greenfield expansion in areas that lacked the "core infrastructure first".
"For too long we've seen this lag with infrastructure keeping up with housing growth," he said.
"The areas towards our west - Lucas, Winter Valley, and some parts of Alfredton - didn't exist several years ago; they were just largely open farmland. Now they're heavily congested and there's a lot of work to do to catch up."
To obviate a repetition of these circumstances in the city's outer north, Cr Moloney said it was critical the state government develop a new, overarching arterial roads strategy for Ballarat.
"Arterial roads are state responsibility, but the bigger part of our challenge is that we've lacked [a current] arterial roads strategy for some time," he said.
"Before we start building houses, there should be the road infrastructure and, ideally, other forms of transport connections in place, backed up by strong telecommunications and sewerage."
The most recent Ballarat roads transport strategy is over 15 years old, and is guided by data and population forecasts outpaced by reality years ago.
The City of Ballarat recently raised the prospect of a new strategy with Roads Minister, Ben Carroll, and Regional Development Victoria, but nearly two months on is yet to receive a response.
Beyond infrastructure concerns loom environmental questions, centred both on the sustainability of unabated greenfield expansion and the possibility of yet more uncongenial housing development along the city's fringes.
The latter owes to the present lack of any requirement on the part of developers to construct new developments according to high standards of environmental sustainability, with such principles yet to find expression in the Ballarat planning scheme.
At this stage, it remains anyone's guess whether the state government will support the recent concerted call of several municipalities, including Ballarat, for tighter environmental controls in their respective planning schemes.
The move to formally unlock the northern growth area for development will also sharpen debate on the substance of council's aspirational 50-50 split between greenfield and infill development to accommodate housing growth.
The rosier assessments put the current ratio at 70-30 greenfield, but this is most likely an underestimate given council's curious tendency to classify subdivisions in new suburbs as 'infill'.
When asked, Cr Moloney said council would, at some point soon, need to consider "hard boundaries" which expressly define limits to greenfield development, as well as identify with precision those areas suitable for inner city infill development.
"There are some pockets of [farming] land that should never be developed, so we need those hard boundaries," he said. "The problem is these [matters] need to be articulated in the housing strategy and until that happens, it's hard to lock [in]."
Though moves to revise the city's housing strategy - which lends content to the planning scheme - have been underway for a number of years, progress has recently stalled, with council still yet to table a draft for community consultation.
The decision to expressly include the Ballarat Commons or 'people's land' in the rezoning exercise will also likely prove contentious within the community.
As previously documented by The Courier, the commons has, since the 19th century, been legally designated as public land for use as open space for all; not private land amenable to development by a select few.
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