Thursday 21st May 2020.

Dear Supporters,

We have had a win!

Sunshine Hospice, as of yesterday, has officially withdrawn their Development Application (DA) for a Material Change of Use (MCU) of 7-15 Illuka Street Buderim, one week out from the anticipated vote by the newly elected Council.

Thank you all for your support by signing this e-Petition and helping raise our voice.

• Thank you to our Division 6 Cr Christian Dickson for his unwavering support of the local plan and the concerned residents, to MP Brent Mickelberg and all of the Sunshine Coast Councillors for listening, responding, and being mindful of the issues with the site, and to the Sunshine Coast Council’s development assessment team for doing their jobs in respect of the town plan, legislation, and the environment.
• Thank you to groups such as the Sunshine Coast Environment Council (SCEC), Wildlife Rescue Sunshine Coast, and Friends of the Forest/Steve Irwin Way Forest group for your advice, guidance, and support. Thank you also to Tim, producer at ABC Radio Mornings with Annie Gaffney, for giving us fair representation in the media and staying with the story all the way. 

It is important to recognise that although the new report from council (in response to the new plans) again recommended that the development application for Sunshine Hospice be rejected, we are still far from fully protecting the site from inappropriate development. We will be taking steps to try to secure a future that this site deserves (a biodiverse, ecologically sensitive, wildlife corridor site within a high risk bushfire and landscape-to-low residential area), and doing our best to stop any activity that does not respect the local plan nor the safety and connectivity of the residents and local wildlife.

New development applications for a Material Change of Use of this site may potentially still be submitted to council by Sunshine Hospice (again) or by other developers, even though this recent application has certainly highlighted the complexities a developer would face attempting to achieve a MCU for this site. 

We also wish to reiterate that we are not against Hospices for our region and should an appropriate site and organisation that can sustainably run a hospice come about, we will support it. We were never about personal gain. Our offer of assistance to council to help Sunshine Hospice find an alternate site (ideally a site that has already been historically logged) still stands. We will, however, be watching to ensure that the problems that arose for us and this site are not shifted to another small community to deal with on their own - a proposal for development of a hospice must be appropriate for the selected site.

Lastly, thank you to our community who gave their time, energy, and money to this cause. We are stronger and more united than ever. We can hold our head high as we embrace this first victory knowing we chose to be informed rather than opinionated. CONGRATULATIONS.

"The truth is inconvertible. Malice may attack it and ignorance may deride it, but, in the end, there it is." Winston Churchill

 

Warm regards,

Illuka Street Community and Surrounds.

 

Here is more information regarding the development application for those of you who are interested:

Back in December 2019, a week out before the councillors were due to initially vote on the DA, the town planner acting on behalf of Sunshine Hospice requested the item (to vote on) be removed from the Agenda of the Council's Ordinary Meeting so they could submit new plans in response to our submissions. Council's report was therefore not released to the public but we were later informed that council's recommendation was to reject the development.

As we expected, the new plans were submitted to council just prior to the March elections, which resulted in five new councillors on the Sunshine Coast. The item to vote on the development by the newly elected council was allocated to the Agenda for the May 28th Ordinary Meeting.

However, no significant changes were made to the development plans in response to our submissions:

• Only 3.5% of the 'total site cover' was reduced and the amount of clearing required for the fire buffer zone (including a 17.5m managed landscape zone) was practically unchanged at 4442.5m2 (73% of the entire site).
• The number of parking bays were reduced in an attempt to reduce the size of the hardform - further increasing the likelihood of problematic parking overflow into the narrowing cul de sac and street - and the proposed reduced hardform area was already on either the cleared or damaged parts of the existing site.
• The gross layout of the building was mostly reconfigured rather than significantly reduced, or rooms/spaces were only renamed. There were still ~70 functional spaces/rooms, including eight bedrooms, seven balconies, 11 bathrooms, three WCs, six kitchens/kitchenettes, three reception areas, 13 storage/supplies rooms, four offices, four meeting/shared space rooms, etc. It was still an imposing, medium-density build - definitely not a "home away from home" - that would have changed the site forever and negatively impacted the wildlife and ecology of the area. 

Sunshine Hospice was again informed of the council's recommendation (to reject the development) for the councillors' vote, before the report was made public, and Sunshine Hospice then chose to withdraw their development application entirely on 20/05/2020.