I WOULD like to make the following points regarding the proposed Town of Gawler boundary changes:
1. From the community events I have attended, the main objection from residents of areas not yet included within the Gawler boundary was the belief that their council rates would increase.
This was often based upon a misunderstanding that the current Gawler rating regime would continue unchanged if their areas were included within the Gawler boundary.
That is not correct.
If Gawler included significant primary producers within its boundary, for instance from Gawler Belt or Hewett, council would amend its rates policy to take account of that.
2. Residents of areas such as Hewett and Gawler Belt have largely acknowledged that they do regard themselves residents of Gawler and have an affinity with the town.
If asked where they live while visiting Adelaide they would reply ‘Gawler’, not Hewett or Kalbeeba.
3. The developers who aim to build in Concordia are building there precisely because, for any reasonable purposes, Concordia is, and is seen as being, part of Gawler and it stands to reason that the new residents of Concordia yet to come would be moving there in the knowledge they were moving to Gawler and could avail themselves of the services provided by the town.
At present there are vanishingly few residents of the Concordia area, but there are some 30,000 predicted to come.
This is further evidenced by the huge signs that developers put up in the development areas surrounding Gawler proclaiming that their development is in Gawler.
4. The proposal to move the two small areas, Bibaringa and Uleybury, out of Gawler’s boundary, offers a straightforward solution to a niggling double rating issue and should not require too much mental energy to approve.
5. Likewise for the proposed inclusion, for the same reason as for item four, of two very small areas within Gawler (from memory these are Reid and a bit of Evanston Park).
6. The proposed inclusion of the small area of Hillier, which is in effect already a contiguous part of the Gawler conurbation, follows that same commonsense approach as the other areas.
7. Town of Gawler is increasingly being surrounded by new housing areas that are being built in the locality specifically because of their location next to Gawler town.
This has the twin potential of a) impoverishing Gawler and its residents as more and more residents of surrounding areas use Gawler resources (already a major cause of the current rates level in Gawler), and b) unfairly and undemocratically denying those same residents of any representation on the council.
8. Without the integrated town planning of the growing urbanisation around Gawler that boundary reform would facilitate and enable, both Town of Gawler and its residents, and the residents of surrounding existing and planned housing areas will be seriously disadvantaged over the medium to long term as the amenities of the Town of Gawler suffer attrition and the ensuing planning and development chaos leave the conurbation and its residents with poorly planned water, road traffic and commerce resources.
9. In the next few years, the human population in and around Gawler is set to at least double.
It is, or should be, obvious that the current town boundary and concomitant funding, planning and traffic management situation will soon become untenable.
The proposal put forward by the Town of Gawler Council is measured, appropriate and farsighted.
Mick Brawn, Gawler East
