A must read - Gary Hunt, a well known Port Douglas architect who until recently was a member of the Waterfront Committee, voices his dismay of the Council's lagoon pool process. This is what he has to say...


Whilst on the Waterfront Committee I wrote a five page letter to all members of the Committee expressing my personal opinion that the Council’s advisors were flawed in their rationale for locating the lagoon pool near St. Mary’s Church and also noted my  concern over the design.

The CEO took “umbrage” (her words) at my report and other advisors clearly took my comments as a personal attack rather than offering an alternative view for all members to consider when reviewing the consultant’s report and recommendations of the local management team.

So I resigned as I did not wish to be party to a Committee that would not support robust debate and simply wanted members to rubber stamp the views of the design and management team. However I feel it is my duty to my community to expose some basic  factual errors so that all of us can more rationally and equitably consider what is best for Port Douglas.

To my mind there are 3 core issues:

The Size
The Location
The Design

The consultants based the size of the Port Douglas pool on a comparison with the Airlie Beach pool and came up with a pool around a third the size of the one in Airlie.  They provided reference sources for the population likely to use the pool for each location.

But in the case of Port Douglas they only considered users from Port Douglas, Oak Beach, Cooya and Mossman as likely users. My guess is that people in Julatten, Daintree, Wonga, Palm Cove and many other places would be attracted to the pool.

But even if we assume the consultants are right in their assessment of where people will come from – in the case of the Whitsundays their population count took in the whole amalgamated Bowen and Whitsunday Shire. This includes people driving for 1½ hours from Bowen – or catching a ferry and bus from the Whitsunday Islands!!

Hardly apples for apples.

If you compare a similar built-up area around Airlie Beach to Port Douglas the population is LESS in Airlie!! So on their rationale our pool should be BIGGER.

For visitor numbers the Design & Management team used the same flawed rationale. They compared the visitors staying in Port Douglas with those in the Whitsundays.

Only problem is that the numbers they used for the Whitsundays included all the resorts and the islands – not just accommodation on the mainland.  Hard to imagine someone from Hayman making a 3 hour trip for a swim in Airlie!!

Again if you use the real figures for Airlie Beach versus Port Douglas the opposite is true to what we are being told by the consultants.  There are considerably MORE beds and visitors in Port Douglas than Airlie Beach. So again, using their own logic, our pool should be BIGGER than the one in Airlie.

The consultants own report acknowledges that in the peak time Airlie can have up to 1,400 bathers per day. Their extrapolation for Port Douglas is 257 per day!! They note that they may be wrong by a factor of 100% but even then that is only a bit over 500 for a whole day...

How could they get it so wrong?

Now for the location.

Four and a half years of consultation with our community has been put to one side.

The St. Mary’s site has only been on the local management team’s radar since just before Christmas. The Council hosted a Workshop for local design professionals, Council staff and Committee members for two days in October 2010.

In all the work we did for the Landscape Design Guide there was never a mention of siting the pool beside St. Mary’s.

The irreverence of expecting a funeral to be in empathy with fun loving scantily clad bathers is breathtaking in its audacity.  How utterly insensitive. For this reason alone the site should not even be on the table.

The comparisons between the four sites is so wrong it should be embarrassing to the authors but is being highly promoted by local Council management. Don’t worry about bathers subjected to the stench of the stink tree right beside the pool. Forget about the time and cost to demolish all the buildings and rip up the bitumen, power, water and sewer services where the pool is going. Or all the approvals for a new trailer boat park as well as time and cost to move where they park now.

Don’t worry that the parking for the markets is being moved away up behind the Quicksilver workshop. Ignore the fact there are only 10 car spaces planned for users of the Rex Smeal Park. Scrap the idea of exposing the original access to the Sugar Wharf as an historic element adopted by the community in previous studies.

Don’t worry about the sunbathing area being right beside the new entry road to the town centre. Move the town centre from Macrossan Street to beside the Coast Guard. Forget that the building opposite the lagoon can be three stories high. Ignore the fact that there are buildings on 3 of the 4 sides of the site.

And if we do get a pool the size it should be it won’t even fit!! Just a minor detail.

Now let’s look at the design.

We’ve got an undersize pool in a predominantly urban environment. The designers have created a series of mounds about 3 metres high that block out views to the sea and the beautiful St. Mary’s beach. And under these mounds are toilets.  Smelly, fetid, fungal, hot and lacking ventilation.  Or maybe the designers are going to the expense of air conditioning them.....

On one hand the advisors tell us the pool should be 4 metres above high tide because in a storm surge the water in the pool might get wet – but it is OK to put all the expensive pool machinery in a basement below sea level!!

Look at the spider web of paths – the Landscape Architects own design guide says it should be ‘natural’ but we are looking at a network of harsh surfaces with islands of grass and plantings.

And then there is the wonderful idea of illuminated plastic coral to swim around at night – could we do anything tackier.

Lastly, and critically, there is the issue of public consultation.

What a sham.

The community should be given an opportunity to consider the pros and cons of all 4 sites .... particularly when 2 sites have only been on the drawing board since just before Christmas.

Instead we had a shop display with about 14 large display boards extolling the virtues and design for the consultant’s anointed site. And just one A3 page on a comparison with the 4 sites.  And even that comparison only highlighted the positives for the chosen site – no negatives. For the other 3 sites only the negative aspects were highlighted.

So we have an extraordinarily biased chunk of information upon which we are expected to make a decision.

The Council team will tell us look at the Council web site – it has more information on the 4 sites. But that information is as equally flawed as the justification for the size of the pool.

There needs to be accountability for such an inaccurate and misleading report and such a biased presentation. It is staggering that the management team discarded their own online survey because they considered it “unreliable and not a controlled sample” .  How arrogant.  Bad luck for those who did the survey ...you wasted your time in the eyes of the advisors to Council. 

This “ unreliable survey”  favoured the Rex Smeal site by a factor three times greater than the St Mary’s site...how convenient it could not be relied upon as a true view of the community. And even their preferred telephone survey was not in favour of the St Mary’s site!!

Clearly the local community’s views don’t mean much to the design team ..They Know What is Best for Us!!

Port Douglas deserves a lagoon of the correct size with a “wow factor” that can be marketed here and overseas.

The Chairman of Tourism Queensland advised the Premier and Treasurer that this lagoon is the most important tourism infrastructure project in the State. So let’s not be put off by the scare mongering on gaining approvals and funding.

If it is worthy and supported by a sizable chunk of the community on merit then funding will follow.

Airlie Beach got $17M in funding for the revitalisation of its main street from 3 levels of Government – we can do the same if we try hard enough.

Our community.... and tourism industry which is the keystone to our economy..... deserves nothing less than an exemplary lagoon typifying the essence of the laid back Port Douglas lifestyle and its natural values. Not an under size pool in an urban environment.

Make sure you let our Councillors know that we are not happy with the advice they are getting from a small number of their bureaucrats and consultants (the majority do a great job!!!).
 
Or we will be seeing another episode of “Yes Minister.”

Gary Hunt