Kate Hodgkinson

Presentation to IHAP on 30th October 2007 26a Flowers Drive Catherine Hill Bay

RE: Concept Plan (MP 06 0330) Catherine Hill Bay Ph 0249725051

I object to the Concept Plan from a long-term residents point of view

I am Kate Hodgkinson, I have been associated with the village of C.H.B. for 35 years. In 1972, number 13 Flowers Drive, became our extended family holiday cottage. This was one of the first houses to be sold to a non-mining family. My identification with Catho deepened in 1990 when my husband Toby Dupree and I purchased the Public School and Teacher’s Residence as our home in which to raise our four children.

Catherine Hill Bay, an isolated, historic, mining village with few services or facilities seems an odd choice of place to build 900 plus new dwellings and a commercial area, when there are at least 85 more suitable sites within the Lower Hunter according to the NSW Dept of Planning.

As a long time resident and previously as a regular visitor, I have come to know many of the older mining families and they told me that when mining was no longer viable “the company” had promised to rehabilitate the land for use as public open space. These older families and the newcomers like myself, believed that CHB would be protected from over development and would remain essentially the Catho we love, the way it is, the two old settlements in their isolated, coastal, bushland setting, self sustainable in water and sewerage, as an historic settlement for future generations.

Over the last 40 years we have understood that there has been a strengthening case to protect the Wallarah Peninsula as a green buffer between Central Coast and Newcastle and that State and Local Government have been supportive of this since 1970’s. We understand that it is LMCC view that CHB remain a “hideaway village” and be listed with the State Heritage Office.

The appeal, to the thousands of people who know and love “Catho”, is its timelessness, the beautiful, isolated, village and secluded surf beach with its huge ocean jetty and vista of heritage miners’ cottages surrounded by bushland and the traditional single storey weatherboard pub with its wide cool verandah and view down the length of the beach to the ocean beyond.

Catherine Hill Bay is not a synthetic reproduced tourist attraction but an original quiet, living village.

When so many people say they would love to live in Catherine Hill Bay, it is not in a large new suburb, but in one of the old miners’ cottages in this peaceful little coastal village.

To hear that some land was sold to a developer was beyond belief. The insensitivity of this developer’s Concept Plans, to the community, heritage, environment and existing State and Local Government policies, is simply amazing.

The overwhelming size and location of the development for 600+ dwellings on the Coastal Protection Zone, on top of an historic village of only 50 cottages and that combined with Coal and Allied’s Plans for 300 dwellings at Middle Camp and with all this adjoining and intruding into extensive old and regenerating coastal bushland, is too big and too close.

There is great concern in the community about the two dangerous intersections with the Pacific Hwy and also Flowers Drive and Clarke Street. When cars are parked on either or just one side, traffic must slow or stop to allow vehicles to pass. There is no room to widen the road through Middle Camp or The Bay. Already on weekends and holidays or when Nippers, surf carnivals, funerals or other activities are on at the Bowling Club or the Pub it is obvious that the road is hardly adequate. According to LMCC “The proposed developments on the Wallarah Peninsula and at Gwandalan, will increase the local population approximately three-fold” and therefore a three-fold increase in visitation rates to Catho! This is without any development at Catherine Hill Bay. The Concept Plan does not address the traffic issue.

In 16 years of living here full-time with our family of six we have never bought water. The septic system works fine. Catherine Hill Bay does not want or need town water and sewerage. The cost, to community and Local Council and damage to environment, to supply infrastructure, (water, sewerage, power and possibly gas) to such an isolated place is very questionable. It seems extremely short sighted to force a community, which is self-sufficient in water and waste disposal, to become a burden on the State and Municipal system at a time of water shortage and global warming

For the first time ever there have been up to five properties for sale in Catho and they have been on the market for a long time. Usually properties in Catho are sold within days or weeks of listing. It seems very wrong that the developer’s land, zoned 7(1) Environmental Protection (i.e. one dwelling per 100ha.), is rezoned with (part 3A) and suddenly increases enormously in value while the locals watch their property’s value and their lifestyle fade away.

I know that everything changes with time, however to bury the top end of Catherine Hill Bay with 600 new houses and associated commercial business, and to swamp and surround Middle Camp with 300 new houses, is to change and LOSE FOREVER the very things that make Catherine Hill Bay UNIQUE and SPECIAL.