Abandon The Wellington Point Reserve Master Plan

Once again the Redlands shire council parks management team are up to their old tricks. Those of you that have been around for awhile will remember the garbage that they tried last time with the help of some well heeled close by residents and a councillor willing to do their bidding.

This involved gating off the reserve and boat ramp at night and cutting trailer parking in half along with a heap of other moves to make it hard for people even without boats to use the park. Once people found out what they were up to the public outcry was huge and the plan was stopped. The management team came back with another plan while not as bad as the first was still bad. They tried to get it rushed through council before an upcoming local government election. But a small group of fishoes including myself had several “heated” meetings with the management team and the councillor involved to get the vote on the plan deferred to after the election.

At these meetings the parks management team made it quite clear that they were anti fishing and anti boating and they said that eventually they would like the boat ramps and car parking removed from the reserve as it is an eyesore and spoils the ,weasel word warning, “amenity” of the area. Traffic flow is to be reversed and any cars entering the reserve will have to travel past the ramp to get out again. This, in their words, is to remove dead zones in the park to prevent hooning. You can imagine the hassles that redirecting all the traffic past the ramp is going to cause particularly on busy weekends.

Another genius idea is to remove the trailer parking bays to the right of the ramp and replacing them with ordinary car parks and picnic tables. This area will also have a foot path cycle path that will run straight across the top of the ramp. Now stop and have a think about this, people and there kids are going to park in these spots and sooner or later they are going to want to go out on the jetty or walk round the reserve.

So now you have a busy foot path leading heaps of people many of them children straight across the path of people reversing boats on trailers with very limited visibility. To make it worse the boats have got to be reversed quicker than normal to dodge the artificially increased traffic flow. When the first kiddie is run over i hope that the people responsible for this plan names and addresses will be supplied to the grieving parents.