Councillors fiddle while height limit burns

THE horse has bolted apparently and it might be too late for the State Government to allow the Bass Coast Shire Council to shut the gate.

We’re talking about the character of Inverloch and the fact that 11 metres, not 7 metres or even 9.5 metres, is now effectively the allowable height limit for houses and residential projects in the town’s General Residential Zone (GRZ).

In fact, those who’ve accepted the shire’s recommendation over the years and built a house under 7 metres are starting to look like real dopes.

At a VCAT hearing into the planned development of a 14-metre-high apartment block, adjacent to the foreshore, on the old Inverloch Marine site, not even a specific DDO, setting a height limit of 9.5 metres could hold the developers off.

And it was the existence of a growing number of homes and townhouses, stretching up towards 11 metres in the residential zone of the town, hoping to gain even a glimpse of the water, if not a commanding view to add to their project’s value, that could swing the result for the residential hotel’s investors.

The council will tell you that the State Government’s controversial Bass Coast Distinctive Areas and Landscapes project has delayed the preparation of its Neighbourhood Character Study, Housing Strategy, and Residential Development Framework, supposed to protect Inverloch and elsewhere from the evils of growth.

It’s supposed to stop the nuking of home sites in the once leafy town, the 100% footprints of these new McMansions and, yes, the reaching for the skies… but it might simply be too late.

You can’t pull them down. In the absence of a planning scheme with real teeth, one that actually said homes over 7 metres would not be approved, local homeowners and developers have driven a truck through the shire’s flimsy regulations and pretty much done whatever the hell they like at Inverloch.

What they’ve done, in the absence of an enforceable law, has already established a new character for built form in the town, and it’s looking increasingly like we’re simply going to have to adjust our tape measures, up.