Miles St Reserve proposal to return to council in June

Revised plans to expand the Miles and Dodds Street Reserve in Southbank are expected to return to the City of Melbourne for a final decision in June, but further concerns have been raised with the council’s latest round of consultation.

As reported in the April edition of Southbank News, in March councillors voted to have another go at revising designs and renewing consultation efforts after receiving a mere 113 responses to its second round of consultation.

While 53 per cent of those respondents didn’t support the plans to expand the reserve by closing the northern side of Miles St, this represented roughly three per cent of the more than 3000 people who live in the area.

Both the Southbank Residents’ Association (SRA) and Southbank3006 were critical of the process at the March 18 Future Melbourne Committee (FMC) meeting, with neither group having been directly engaged by the council to help drive consultation.

Chief among the community’s concerns regarding the proposal are safety and a loss of car parking.

The latest round of community consultation took place between April 14 and 28. The council told Southbank News that an engagement summary and recommendation with next steps would be presented to councillors for consideration at an FMC meeting in June.

Southbank News understands that the council has collected more than double the number of responses it received to its second round of consultation earlier this year, but SRA president Tony Penna said the process had still been less than sufficient.

Despite Lord Mayor Nick Reece imploring council officers in March to take a renewed focus to achieving a more comprehensive community engagement process, Mr Penna said key stakeholders in the area still hadn’t been properly consulted.

Among those Mr Penna claimed hadn’t been adequately engaged by the council were the Victoria Barracks, and the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School (VCASS), whose students have very little access to open space in the local area.

A VCASS representative told Southbank News that the council had shared its Participate Melbourne survey link and a copy of the proposal, and that the school’s student leadership had responded “as a group” to the survey.

A spokesperson for the Department of Defence, which is responsible for Victoria Barracks, told Southbank News that the council engaged with it in mid-2024 regarding the proposal.

“Traffic impacts were discussed with Defence but the proposal was considered to have minimal impact to ongoing operations at Victoria Barracks,” the spokesperson said.

Mr Penna stressed that SRA was not an advocate for whether the park should be redesigned and expanded, but “merely that community consultation occurred properly”.

He said SRA was “still highly disappointed with their whole process” and claimed Victoria Barracks and VCASS “were both overlooked”.

“VCASS is only 150 metres away and this green open space is essentially all their students have access to. How could they have been forgotten?” Mr Penna said.

“VCASS was finally included in this third round, however, the consultation was over the school holidays and only for two weeks. Hardly a sincere effort.” •