The truth about Inverloch’s path

Last Wednesday, the Bass Coast Shire Council voted to finally go ahead and extend the Surf Parade footpath at Inverloch from Ozone Street to Goroke Street.

However, they claimed the only way DEECA would agree to a roadway plus carparking was with a one-way strip.

Cr Brett Tessari said the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action “told us umpteen times” that they were never going to allow vegetation to be removed from the foreshore, a fragile foreshore it must be acknowledged, for the works to go ahead.

But the reality is that back in 2015, the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP) had already ticked it off, and not just on the short section between Ozone and Goroke, but the whole 2.4km length from Cape Paterson Road, all the way to Abbott Street.

Here’s what the shire officers’ report to council said that year, at the March 18 and March 25 meetings, when the council took the unprecedented step of postponing a decision on an item and calling a special meeting the following week just to receive a late submission.

“The proposed footpath will be approximately 2.4 kilometres in length stretching from Cape Paterson Road in the west to Abbott Street in the east. The footpath will be 2.5 metres wide with a one-metre barrier kerb to the Surf Parade Road Surface. The footpath will be constructed of reinforced concrete. The project also involves the formalising of a number of on street parking spots and some existing gravel car parking areas. Two bridges are to be provided one over Wreck Creek and one over Ayr Creek. The application involves the removal of native vegetation along the route of the proposed footpath. The total extent of vegetation to be removed is 0.753 hectares of which 0.542 ha of this is remnant patches of vegetation.”

Did you mark that… “0.753 hectares” to be removed (and offset) over the entire 2.4km length of the path.

The officers even recommended that the council approve the plan, taking into account the conditions set out by DELWP, and it was even moved successfully as such by Cr Clare Le Serve and Cr Andrew Phillips. However, the vote was effectively scuttled by a contrary motion moved by Crs Jordan Crugnale and Neil Rankine, calling for a deferral “for a short time” while DELWP was asked to review its own decision and a slab of the funding was used for “an appropriately qualified specialist in primary and secondary dune and coastal vegetation and independent ecologist/botanist and a geomorphologist to assess the impact of the proposed pathway including the access tracks and carparks to the coastal foreshore”.

Ultimately, the original project didn’t go ahead, and may never be extended through to Cape Paterson Road as a result.

We could have had a 2.4km path with minimal loss of vegetation and plenty of parking, now we’ve got a one-way road and some parking that may well do the job but that’s the truth of what happened.

And attempts by others to try and rewrite history should be exposed for what they are.